America's debt to John Calvin

WORLD Magazine ^ | July 04, 2009 | John Piper

[Alex Murphy]

In this year of John Calvin's 500th birthday, I don't know of a better place to read about his impact on America than Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism given at Princeton Seminary in October 1898. Kuyper was a pastor, a journalist, the founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, and prime minister of the Netherlands.

John Calvin and Martin Luther were the twin pillars of the Protestant Reformation. Why do fewer people speak of Luther's culture-shaping impact on America, but for centuries Calvin has been seen in this light? Kuyper argues,

Luther's starting-point was the . . . principle of justifying faith; while Calvin's . . . lay in the general cosmological principle of the sovereignty of God. . . . [Hence] Lutheranism restricted itself to an exclusively ecclesiastical and theological character, while Calvinism put its impress in and outside the Church upon every department of human life.

It is the personal pervasiveness of God's sovereignty that makes all the difference. This means that "the whole of a man's life is to be lived as in the Divine Presence." This "fundamental thought of Calvinism" shaped all of life. "It is from this mother-thought that the all-embracing life system of Calvinism sprang."

For example, Calvin's doctrine of "vocation" follows from the fact that every person, great and small, lives "in the Divine Presence." God's sovereign purposes govern the simplest occupation. He attends to everyone's work. This yielded the Protestant work ethic. Huge benefits flow from a cultural shift in which all work is done earnestly and honestly with an eye to God.

Or consider how Calvinism breathed an impulse of freedom into modern history. The decisive principle was

the sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole Cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible. A primordial Sovereignty which eradicates in mankind . . . a threefold . . . supremacy, viz., (1) the sovereignty of the State; (2) the sovereignty in Society; and (3) the sovereignty in the Church.

God's sovereign claim on every person and every sphere of society relativized all other claims. It began with the churches.

The sovereignty of Christ remains absolutely monarchical, but the government of the Church on earth becomes democratic to its bones and marrow. . . . No church may exercise any dominion over another, but . . . all local churches are of equal rank.

This impulse of freedom spread to the political sphere. Calvin and his heirs had a strong predilection for republican government—and an aversion to monarchy. A benevolent dictatorship would be ideal in a sinless world. But in a sinful world, it brings the horrors of tyranny. "Call to mind . . . that Calvinism has captured and guaranteed to us our constitutional civil rights."

We ask: Why then did Calvin endorse the death of Servetus for heresy? How was this part of his liberating impulse? Kuyper's answer is helpful.

I not only deplore that . . . I unconditionally disapprove of it; yet not as if it were the expression of a special characteristic of Calvinism, but on the contrary as the fatal after-effect of a system, grey with age, which Calvinism found in existence, under which it had grown up, and from which it had not yet been able entirely to liberate itself.

A thousand years of abuses are not thrown off overnight. But the impulses of liberty, flowing from the decisive principle of the all-embracing sovereignty of God, proved to be unstoppable. "Calvinism has liberated Switzerland, the Netherlands, and England, and in the Pilgrim Fathers has provided the impulse to the prosperity of the United States."

Kuyper closed his lectures with a claim that for many today sounds preposterous. Do not write him off. Get the book Lectures on Calvinism, and test these words, spoken to Americans in 1898:

In the rise of your university education . . . in the decentralized . . . character of your local governments . . . in your championship of free speech, and in your unlimited regard for freedom of conscience; in all this . . . it is demonstrable that you owe this to Calvinism and to Calvinism alone.

[Alex Murphy]

"Calvinism has liberated Switzerland, the Netherlands, and England, and in the Pilgrim Fathers has provided the impulse to the prosperity of the United States."

[gusopol3]

As George III called the American Revolution, “That Presbyterian rebellion.”

[discomatic]

We were always destined to honor John Calvin’s 500th birthday.

[Tennessee Nana]

Plus the Walloons and the Huguenots who had a great impact on the beginnings of America...

[Nosterrex]

As a Lutheran, I would take exception that Calvin is more important than Luther. It was Martin Luther, long before John Calvin, that had established the Protestant work ethic and the teaching on vocation. I would agree with his views on the difference between Calvin and Luther when it comes to the distinction between the two kingdoms. As the saying goes, Calvin loved the glory of God, while Luther gloried in the love of God.

[WVNan]

I have treasured my studies in Calvimism in seminary. The man was an absolute genius.

[Tolkien]

Luther and Calvin served their purpose.

[MWS]

Thank you for posting this. It has admittedly sparked an interest in me to study Calvin a bit more deeply.

[WVNan]

Calvinism. Sorry about the typo. Letters are worn off.

[xzins]

America owes a huge debt to Calvin. Most of the Founders were out of some reformed religious background.

The huge majority were Christian reformers, and even the very few who were “deists” were “Christian deists.”

It’s a verifiable fact of history.

[Nosterrex]

My aim is not to disparage the contributions of the Frenchman, Calvin. The French have their purposes, too. I would say that in America, Calvin has had a much greater impact than Luther although I doubt that Calvin would want anything to do with the Reformed denominations in Holland or America. Calvinism is dead except in a few small pockets of America and England. Certainly the political activism we see within much of American Christianity or Evangelicalism is a manifestation of Calvin's failure to distinguish between the two kingdoms in which the state becomes an instrument of the church. Luther's statement that he would rather have a wise Turk for a prince than a stupid Christian would hardly be acceptable to a Calvinist.
Calvinism does not need to make extravagant claims about its history and impact on society.

[narses]

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[MWS]

Thanks, I’ll be sure to check that out.

[Cicero]

I have no problem with honoring Calvin on his 500th anniversary. But I do have some problems with the historicity of the “Protestant work ethic.”

I have done quite a lot of research and writing in that area, and I would say that it is, rather, a “Christian work ethic” that developed in Europe and the West, not a specificially Protestant movement.

Yes, it’s true that for whatever reason, England was central to the development of science, technology, and the agricultural and industrial revolutions. But you can find a work ethic in the Middle Ages as well as after the Reformation. And you can also trace it back to a very clear expression in Virgil’s “Georgics.” The Virgilian triad, also well known in the middle ages, involved three styles of life: pastoral leisure, georgic labor, and epic warfare.

Also, FWIW, “vocation” is not solely a Calvinist or a Protestant phenomenon. It was well established earlier in the Catholic Church that everyone has a calling. The Parable of the Talents would suffice to develop that idea.

[stfassisi]

LIBERTAS

This is what is truth in how society should operate

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_20061888_libertas_en.html

[Petronski]

The "university education" is owing to Calvin alone?

Oh good grief.

[Judges Gone Wild]

Anton La Vey used psychology to formulate his ideas. Your intolerance for views that differ from your own is like to that of Ahmadinejad.

[stfassisi]

Anton La Vey used psychology to formulate his ideas

Calvin did the same because his pride psychologically convinced himself that he was doing the work of God just like Ahmadinejad.

Calvin denies free will thus making God the creator of evil

[MWS]

Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical “Libertas” may or may not be how a society should operate, but that hardly makes Calvin’s writings, which focus on the all-encompassing sovereignty and power of God, equivalent to the Satanic Bible.

Coming from a Catholic backgroud, I admittedly have never been particularly fond of Calvin, with his doctrines of double predestination and whatnot. I will say that I have not given him a fair hearing, however, and that this article has inspired me to at least learn a bit more about his side of things.