Reformed Christianity

• 1. Introduction

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  Reformed Christianity began in 16th-century Switzerland with a single, charged dispute: how exactly is Christ present in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper? That question drove a wedge between Huldrych Zwingli and Martin Luther at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, and from that failed meeting emerged a distinct Protestant tradition that would eventually number tens of millions of believers across every inhabited continent. What made this tradition different from other branches of Protestantism? Why did it collide so fiercely with Lutherans over bread and wine, yet still share the same core conviction of salvation by faith alone? And how did a movement rooted in Zurich and Geneva come to shape the founding documents of the United States, the abolition of slavery, and the rise of modern capitalism? These are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A Name It Rejected

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  John Calvin was born Jehan Cauvin, and he spent most of his working life in Geneva, Switzerland. He did not create the Reformed tradition alone, but he became so central to it that his opponents gave it his name. Rival Lutherans first used the term "Calvinism" in the 1550s, and Calvin himself disapproved. Religious scholars have since described that label as misleading, inaccurate, and what one described as "inherently distortive." The tradition's own self-designation was simply "Reformed Church," a term that began in Switzerland and Germany and quickly spread to the Dutch Republic. The movement that preceded Calvin was already substantial. Zwingli, Martin Bucer, Wolfgang Capito, John Oecolampadius, and Guillaume Farel formed the first wave of Reformed theologians, each from different academic backgrounds but already united around the authority of scripture and a rejection of Christ's bodily presence in the Eucharist. Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, written between 1536 and 1539, became one of the most influential works of that era. The 1549 Consensus Tigurinus then unified two competing positions on the Lord's Supper, one held by Zwingli and Bullinger that treated communion as a memorial, and Calvin's view that Christ was truly present though spiritually rather than bodily. That document of compromise gave the movement a stability that allowed it to spread rapidly, in marked contrast to the bitter controversies that divided Lutherans before their own Formula of Concord in 1579.

• 3. Doctrine of Grace and Its Discontents

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  Calvin asserted that original sin was "a hereditary corruption and depravity of our nature, extending to all the parts of the soul," and that everything a person's mind conceives is "always evil." This is the starting point for what Reformed theologians call total depravity, the first of the five doctrinal pillars summarized by the acrostic TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints. These five points are popularly said to summarize the Canons of Dort, but scholars point out there is no direct historical relationship between the acrostic and those canons, and that the language of total depravity and limited atonement can distort both Calvin's theology and 17th-century Calvinist orthodoxy. The acrostic itself appears to date to a use by Cleland Boyd McAfee around 1905, with an early printed appearance in Loraine Boettner's 1932 book, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. The five points were more recently popularized in a 1963 booklet by David N. Steele and Curtis C. Thomas. A more obscure Reformed reply to the Arminians called the Counter Remonstrance of 1611 may have outlined the five points before Dort was even convened. The deepest controversy inside the tradition was not the acrostic but the 17th-century Arminian Controversy, when Jacobus Arminius and his followers, called the Remonstrants, were forcibly removed from the Dutch Reformed Church over their view that God's choice of whom to save is conditional on his foreknowledge. The resulting Canons of Dort settled the question for mainstream Reformed orthodoxy, though some theologians continued using "Reformed" in a broader sense that included Arminians.

• 4. How a Tradition Travels

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  Calvinism was declared the official religion of the Kingdom of Navarre by the queen regnant Jeanne d'Albret after her conversion in 1560. In 1573, William the Silent joined the Calvinist Church. The Heidelberg Catechism was formulated in 1563 after Calvinism was adopted in the Electorate of the Palatinate under Frederick III, and it and the Belgic Confession became confessional standards at the first synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1571. Calvin's missionary work in France carried his program of reform into the French-speaking provinces of the Netherlands, and leading divines settled in England, including Bucer, Martyr, and John Łaski. John Knox brought Reformed theology to the Church of Scotland after time in Calvin's Geneva. During the First English Civil War, English and Scots Presbyterians produced the Westminster Confession, which became the confessional standard for Presbyterians throughout the English-speaking world. Many 17th-century European settlers in the Thirteen Colonies were Calvinists who had emigrated because of arguments over church structure, including the Pilgrim Fathers and the French Huguenots. Sierra Leone was largely colonized by Calvinist settlers from Nova Scotia, many of whom were Black Loyalists who had fought for the British Empire during the American War of Independence. John Marrant had organized a congregation there under the auspices of the Huntingdon Connection. The tradition's reach into the Pacific and East Asia came chiefly through 19th and 20th-century missionaries. In South Korea today there are 20,000 Presbyterian congregations with approximately 9 to 10 million church members scattered across more than 100 Presbyterian denominations, making Presbyterianism the largest Christian denomination in that country.

• 5. Democracy, Commerce, and Reform

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  Calvin expressed himself on the question of lending money in a 1545 letter to a friend, Claude de Sachin. He challenged the use of scripture passages cited against charging interest, dismissed the Aristotelian argument that money is barren and therefore cannot produce more, and concluded that money can be made fruitful just as a house can be rented for income. He did qualify his view: money should be lent to people in dire need without expecting interest, while a modest rate of 5% was permissible for other borrowers. Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argued that capitalism in Northern Europe emerged when the Protestant, and particularly Calvinist, ethic influenced large numbers of people toward secular work, trade, and the accumulation of wealth for investment. In politics, Calvin favored a mixture of democracy and aristocracy as the best form of government, advocated separating political power among institutions through a system of checks and balances, and insisted that the church's right to excommunicate not be surrendered to the state. The Huguenots extended this further by adding synods whose members were elected by congregations, creating what was essentially a representative democracy. The Congregationalists who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620 and Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1628 were convinced that democratic government was the will of God. In the 19th century, churches shaped by Calvinist theology became involved in abolition, with figures including William Wilberforce, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln among those associated with that cause. The founders of the Red Cross Movement, including Henry Dunant, were Reformed Christians, and their movement also initiated the Geneva Conventions. American Congregationalists founded Harvard University in 1636 and Yale University in 1701, along with about a dozen other colleges.

• 6. Branches and Internal Debates

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  Abraham Kuyper, a theologian who later became Dutch prime minister, launched Neo-Calvinism beginning in the 1880s with a declaration that has become something of a rallying call for the movement: "No single piece of our mental world is to be sealed off from the rest and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'" Christian Reconstructionism, founded by R. J. Rushdoony, took a different path, aiming to apply Calvinist principles to civil law and social order. That movement peaked in the 1990s and lives on in small denominations and as a minority position in others. Hyper-Calvinism, which became prominent among some early English Particular Baptists in the 18th century and is associated with theologians John Gill and Joseph Hussey, took the sovereignty of God so far as to deny that all people were obligated to repent and believe. Missionaries such as William Carey pushed back, arguing against the mindset that "if God wants to save the heathen, He will do it without your help or mine." In March 2009, Time magazine described the New Calvinism as one of the "10 ideas changing the world." Figures associated with it included John Piper, Mark Driscoll, Al Mohler, Mark Dever, C. J. Mahaney, and Tim Keller. Critics of the New Calvinism accused it of blending Calvinist soteriology with popular Evangelical positions while rejecting confessionalism and covenant theology, which older Reformed traditions regard as central. The World Communion of Reformed Churches, the broadest interdenominational body, includes more than 100 million members in 211 member denominations, making it the fourth largest Christian communion in the world after the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and the Anglican Communion.