Calvinism: A History

by Darryl G. Hart

Publisher:

Yale University Press

, 2013

Overview

The first single-volume history of Reformed Protestantism from its sixteenth-century origins to the present.

This briskly told history of Reformed Protestantism takes these churches through their entire 500-year history—from sixteenth-century Zurich and Geneva to modern locations as far flung as Seoul and São Paulo. D. G. Hart explores specifically the social and political developments that enabled Calvinism to establish a global presence.

Hart’s approach features significant episodes in the institutional history of Calvinism that are responsible for its contemporary profile. He traces the political and religious circumstances that first created space for Reformed churches in Europe and later contributed to Calvinism’s expansion around the world. He discusses the effects of the American and French Revolutions on ecclesiastical establishments as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century communions, particularly in Scotland, the Netherlands, the United States, and Germany, that directly challenged church dependence on the state. Raising important questions about secularization, religious freedom, privatization of faith, and the place of religion in public life, this book will appeal not only to readers with interests in the history of religion but also in the role of religion in political and social life today.

Key Features

• Explores the history of Reformed Protestantism through its 500-year span and various continents
• Follows Calvinism as an expression of western Christianity that emergened in central Europe and gradually established itself all throughout the continent and around the world
• Examines the unlikely ways by which Calvinism became a global belief

Contents

• City Lights
• God’s Fickle Anointed
• To Rebel and to Build
• Shaking the Foundations
• Taking the Word of the World
• New Communities in the Land of the Free
• An Exhausted Europe
• Reformation Reawakened
• Missionary Zeal
• Kirk Ruptured and Church Freed
• The Netherlands’ New Way
• American Fundamentalists
• The Confessing Church
• Conclusion

Product Details

• Title: Calvinism: A History
• Author: Darryl G. Hart
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Print Publication Date: 2013
• Pages: 352
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Resource ID: LLS:CALVINISMAHST
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2021-01-22T16:12:16Z

About Darryl G. Hart

Hart is director of the honors program and faculty development at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, based in Wilmington, Delaware. Previously he served as head librarian and associate professor of church history and theological biblography at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is the author or editor of various studies in American chruch history, including Defending the Faith: J. Grescham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Johns Hopkins).