Calvin and Equity

This chapter argues that the concept of equity plays a crucial role in Calvin’s early writings, especially in the Commentary on Seneca and the 1536 edition of the Institutes. Calvin embraces two distinct yet inseparable meanings of the term ‘equity’. One sense is as an interpretative principle of natural law, and the goal at which all civil law aims. The other sense is an application of the interpretative sense, in which a ruler or judge amends a civil law that is too strict or too general to take into account all the particularities of a certain case. Calvin’s concept of equity displays both his humanist legal training as well as the critical place of natural law in his theology.

Introduction

A handbook to Calvin and Calvinism must address the complexities of assessing the influence of one sixteenth-century figure on a religious tradition still very much alive from Brazil to China. Calvinism is a slippery term that suggests that an extremely diverse and often contradictory tradition can be traced to one man. In many respects this is unsustainable, yet patterns emerge. Arguably, the term ‘Reformed’ is more appropriate to reflect the protean character of a branch of Christianity that emerged out of Switzerland during the Reformation to become a global faith. The contributions to this volume bring fresh perspectives to Calvin’s thought and influence and explore the broad spectrum in which they have been manifested over four hundred years in doctrine, institutions, literature, art, politics, and popular culture. Just like its eponymous founder, Calvinism has continually reinvented itself, acquiring new forms and adapting to changing circumstances and cultures.

The First Calvinist Encounters with New World Religions

European Calvinists first encountered Native Americans during three brief expeditions of French adventurers to Brazil and Florida during the mid-sixteenth century. Although short-lived and rarely noted, these expeditions produced a remarkable commentary by Huguenots on the Tupinamba people of Brazil and the Timucuan people of Florida. Informed by Calvinist understandings of human nature and humanist approaches to cultural observation, authors such as Jean de Léry produced narratives that posed European and Christian decadence against the sociability and honesty of Native Americans. They used their experiences in America to suggest that Huguenots in France, like indigenous people in America, ought to be tolerated for their civic virtues whatever their doctrinal allegiances. Huguenot travel writings indicate variations in Calvinist approaches to Native peoples from the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

Unity and Engagement in the Modern World

In the midst of the roiling chaos of the nineteenth century, Abraham Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism was a strategy to maintain a Calvinist unity and engagement with an increasingly disintegrated Western world. The unity Kuyper pursued was of two kinds: intellectual and social. As a thinker, Kuyper valued coherent, interrelated systems. He took as his starting point the systematic Calvinism of Protestant scholastics and the Reformed Confessions as well as Romanticism’s organic impulse which elevated the organic and natural over mechanical and artificial. In addition to a unified mind, Kuyper also pursued a unified Calvinist community, albeit a different kind than imagined by earlier Calvinists. Under the pressures of modernity, Kuyper didn’t pursue a repristinated Calvinist culture, but a renewed Calvinist subculture.

Writing the Nineteenth-Century Scottish Calvinist Self

Nineteenth-century Scotland witnessed the proliferation of spiritual biographies and diaries that recounted the lives of Scottish Calvinist ministers as examples of piety and Christian living. These relatively inexpensive and popular works appeared in a culture of decreasing church attendance and growing secularism. One of the most notable authors of these texts was Andrew Bonar (1810–1892), minister, missionary, and leading figure of the Free Church. Bonar’s biographies and diary reflected both the depth of his Calvinist piety as well as the anxieties arising from rigorous self-examination and the attendant risk of spiritual depression. Bonar’s work reveals the centrality of commemoration and memory in constructing a life of faithful living in the wake of the seemingly irreversible decline of churches in the life of the nation.

Enchanted Calvinism

The goal of this chapter is to explain how healing and deliverance practices were instituted in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (PCG). The first half of this chapter examines the PCG’s initial transformation, which was driven by three factors: the decision by the leadership to introduce healing practices into the church, the creation of the Bible Study and Prayer Group to manage the afflicted within congregations, and the influence of two parachurch organizations. The second half of this chapter focuses on Catechist Ebenezer Abboah-Offei, who since 1996 has been leading Grace Presbyterian Church in Akropong, the primary site of healing and deliverance practices within the PCG. With regards to Abboah-Offei, this chapter describes how he came to teach and practise deliverance and the process by which Grace Presbyterian was established. Finally, this chapter describes the various healing and deliverance activities that occur at Grace Presbyterian Church.

Seventeenth-Century Calvinism and Early Enlightenment Thought

Analysing a number of interactions between Calvinists and Early Enlightenment philosophers—and the receptions of John Calvin in these—this chapter shows a complex and persistent presence of Calvin and Calvinists in philosophical debates during the early Enlightenment period. Among Calvinists, Descartes found both opponents and followers. Reformed Cartesians have occasionally appealed to Calvin (e.g. on accommodation and the sensus divinitatis), praised the Reformer (Heidanus, Burman), or neglected him (van Til). The philosopher Arnold Geulincx has been protected (Heidanus.) and published (van Til) by Calvinists, before they began to associate him with Spinoza (Tuinman, Andala, Driessen). Thomas Hobbes quoted Calvin incidentally, but Calvinists usually opposed his philosophy. Thus, the jurist Ulrik Huber used Calvin’s teachings on the testimonium Spiritus sancti against Hobbes—an appeal to Calvin that Huber repeated against another philosopher’s claim that reason alone was able to demonstrate the divinity of scripture. In order to refute Spinozists, Reformed minister Carolus Tuinman translated Calvin’s treatise against the libertines (1545). Responding to Huguenot Pierre Bayle, the Lutheran philosopher G. W. Leibniz wrote favourably about Calvin’s teachings on predestination and providence, as he had done also about Calvin’s views on the Eucharist.

Reformed Exiles and International Calvinism in Reformation-Era Europe

This chapter evaluates the role of religious exile in the development of confessional Calvinism during the Reformation era. Historians once put considerable emphasis on the widespread experience of exile in encouraging the development of a well-defined international Calvinist movement. This chapter reconsiders this framework from the perspective of theology, ecclesiology, liturgy, discipline, and the relationship to state authority. Drawing on recent research, it argues that, rather than encouraging confessional consolidation, exile was a deeply destabilizing force that helps explain why Reformed Protestantism never developed a unified institutional structure, liturgical practice, or statement of belief.

Calvin, Shakespeare, and Suspense

Calvin and Shakespeare both share an interest in the work of suspense; in the former case, as a feature of anticipating salvation (or not); in the latter, as a narrative function of a play’s conclusion. The mediation of Calvinist soteriology in England through the experimentalist thought of William Perkins links Shakespeare to Calvin, in a shared project of anticipating the future, an anticipation informed both by older providentialist models of probability (in which an ending simply confirms a prior pattern) and emergent models of statistical probability (in which the possibility of reversal of prior patterns exists). After an exploration of the logic of ending in Puritan deathbed accounts of Katherine Stubbes, the chapter concludes with a survey of the interplay of urgency and assurance in some of Shakespeare’s endings, those of King Lear and The Tempest in particular.

Theology and Visual Culture in Early Modern Calvinism

Recent scholarship on the arts and the Reformation has come to focus more broadly on the cultural reconstruction the Reformation made necessary and the resulting material and visual culture. Calvin’s challenge in Geneva was not about what the Reformation had left behind but what would replace that medieval world. Key for Calvin was the experience of worship: the oral performance of the sermon, the singing of Psalms and partaking the sacraments, as a dramatic call enabled by the Holy Spirit summoning worshippers to a vision of God and God’s presence in the world. The regular communal worship and the preached drama of sin and salvation constituted the aesthetic-dramatic mirror (Turner) of the emerging Protestant imagination. This encouraged a mutual caring for the needy but also carried deep aesthetic implications. In the Netherlands this imagination is evident in the placement of textualized images in churches, and in landscape paintings and portraits, and, in France, it stimulated Huguenot architects to recover classical orders in the service of restoring to the earth its Edenic beauty.