5.8: Calvinism

In 1536, Jean Calvin, a French lawyer exiled for his sympathy with Protestantism, settled in Geneva, Switzerland. Born a generation after Luther, religious unity had already been fragmented. In Geneva, Calvin began work on Christian theology and soon formed close ties with the city council. The result of his work was Calvinism, a distinct Protestant denomination that differed in many ways from Lutheranism.

Calvin accepted Luther’s insistence on the role of faith in salvation. However, Calvin reasoned that if God was all-powerful and all-knowing, and he chose to extend his grace to some people but not to others, it was folly to imagine that humans could somehow influence Him. He noted that only some parishioners seemed able to grasp the importance and complexities of scripture, whereas most were indifferent or ignorant. He concluded that God, who transcended both time and space, chose some people as the “elect,” those who will be saved before they are even born. Thus, free will was merely an illusion born of human ignorance, since the fate of a person’s soul was determined before time itself began. This doctrine is called “predestination,” and it was simply the logical extension of the very concept of divine omnipotence according to Calvin.

Figure 7.4.1: Sixteenth-century portrait of Calvin. Austere black clothing became associated with Calvinists, who rejected ostentatious dress and decoration.

Practically speaking, Calvinism involved a kind of circular argument about salvation. Those who were among the elect lived according to the standards of behavior defined in the Bible, refrained from worldly pleasures, and strove to conduct themselves within the legal and social framework of their societies. Thus, good Calvinists were supposed to devote themselves to the study of scripture, temperate living, and hard work. Counterintuitively, it was not that these behaviors would lead to salvation. Rather, it was how the already-saved acted morally according to God’s will. Furthermore, one sign of being a member of the elect was financial success, because success was a side-effect of the focus and hard work that the elect naturally exhibited.

In 1555, Calvin worked with a group of fellow French exiles to stage a coup d’etat of the city council. Then, he created the Consistory, a group of Calvinist ministers who scrutinized the behavior of Geneva’s citizens, fining or imprisoning people for intemperate or ungodly behavior. The idea was that Geneva would be the model Christian community.

While Lutheranism spread to northern Germany and the Scandinavian countries, Calvinism caught on in Switzerland, France (where Calvinists were known as Huguenots), and Scotland (where the Scottish Calvinists became known as Presbyterians). Everywhere, Calvinists set themselves apart by their plain dress and their dour outlook on merriment, celebrations, and the pleasures of the flesh. The best-known Calvinists in the American context were the Puritans, English Calvinists who left Europe, after initially fleeing persecution, to create a perfect Christian community in the new world.

Lutherans and Calvinists quickly came to regard one another as rivals rather than as “fellow” Protestants. Each group finding the other’s respective theology as flawed and misleading as that of Catholicism. While some pragmatic alliances between Protestant groups would eventually emerge because of persecution or war, for the most part, each Protestant denomination claimed to have exclusive access to religious truth.