Calvin and His Influence, 1509–2009

Abstract

This book explores central aspects of Calvin’s influence across the centuries and around the world from his lifetime to the present day. The volume offers a perspective on the full scope of the reformer’s impact on the subsequent course of the Protestant tradition and on modern Western civilization more generally. It opens with an examination of Calvin’s theology as the distillation of the first five centuries of Christianity with all its possibilities and limitations. The next four studies focus on Calvin as man and thinker in his sixteenth-century Genevan context, dealing respectively with aristocracy as an orienting principle in Calvin’s own political theory and ecclesiology; Calvin’s notorious passion for work; Calvin’s authorial style, which exercised a crucial influence on French prose; and the particularities of Calvin’s church in Geneva. There follows a study on Calvin’s relations with the Swiss Reformed churches, which gave his system a particular stamp. The seventh study explores the global nature of Calvin’s influence while chapters 8 to 15 branch out into considering various Calvinisms—which the chapters show conclusively to be more or less removed from Calvin’s thought while still claiming his name and label. These include a study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political Calvinisms, as well as studies of his theological reception from the seventeenth until the nineteenth century. The two final studies deal respectively with the links between the reformer’s thought and the British Evangelicals and with the complex issue of Calvin and South African apartheid.

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