In Our Time - Calvinism

Episode Date: February 25, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and guests Justin Champion, Susan Hardman Moore and Diarmaid MacCulloch discuss the ideas of the religious reformer John Calvin - the theology known as Calvinism, or Reformed Protestantism - and its impact. John Calvin, a Frenchman exiled to Geneva, became a towering figure of the 16th century Reformation of the Christian Church. He achieved this not through charismatic oratory, but through the relentless rigour of his analysis of the Bible. In Geneva, he oversaw an austere, theocratic and sometimes brutal regime. Nonetheless, the explosion of printing made his theology highly mobile. The zeal he instilled in his followers, and the persecution which dogged them, rapidly spread the faith across Europe, and on to the New World in America. One of Calvin's most striking tenets was 'predestination': the idea that, even before the world began, God had already decided which human beings would be damned, and which saved. The hope of being one of the saved gave Calvinists a driving energy which has made their faith a galvanic force in the world, from business to politics. Anxiety about salvation, meanwhile, led to a constant introspection which has left its mark on literature.Justin Champion is Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London; Susan Hardman Moore is Senior Lecturer in Divinity at the University of Edinburgh; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, a dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent. Thus spake John Calwin, God's guard dog, a Frenchman exiled to Geneva,

who became a towering figure of the 16th century Reformation. He achieved this not through charismatic, oratory, but through the relentless rigour of his analysis of the Bible. Insisting on a strict code of personal discipline, Calvin galvanises followers to root out sin wherever they found it. The explosion of printing helped spread his doctrine across Europe and onto the new world. English Puritans went into battle with the Calvinist Geneva Bible in their pockets, but it's also been credited with driving capitalism forward and inspiring an array of political movements. With Middy discussed, the nature and impact of Calvin's ideas are Justin Champion,

Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London. Susan Hardman Scott, senior lecturer in divinity at the University of Edinburgh, and Dermann McCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford. Dermott, can you introduce us to John Calvin, what kind of man was he and what was his background? Well, Melvin, you said the most two important things about him already. He's French and he's an exile for most of his adult life. This is a very brilliant Frenchman who would have had a career, I think, in a university teaching law, But then the Reformation happened.

The Reformation event seized him, and he had to flee from France, he was wandering for a long while, and by a peculiar chain of circumstances, ended up in the city of Geneva, which is stranded between France and Switzerland in the 16th century. And that's where most of the career was. I don't think he actually liked Geneva very much, but he felt that God had put him there,

and you can't argue with God. He started by training as a priest, and then he turned to look, Can you tell us a little bit about what he did in those two disciplines when he was trained them in the universities in France? Well, I guess it's actually exaggerating to say he trained as a priest. When he was a 12-year-old boy, he was given revenues from a little bit of the cathedral in his native town, just like a sort of university bursary or a school bursary. So in no way was he a priest of the old church, and he was never ordained in any church at all.

And that's, I think, something you've got to remember about him. I mean, his self-image is of teacher. And all through his life he is teaching, he's writing, he's preaching incessantly in a pulpit. So he looks very like a clergyman. But in fact, he's not. And that law is very important to him, because his sort of Christianity is very based on the idea of structure, law. It's a very systematized form of the Christian faith. Can you give us a little sketch of his character?

Well, I guess he's not the sort of person you'd want to go down the pub with, unlike, say, Martin Luther, I think you'd have a nice night out with Luther. Calvin was intensely serious, very focused, and very emotional when he was crossed. You would not want to do the wrong thing with Calvin, and a lot of his career is spent in a rage. And yet he could be very self-contained, very organized, very directed. So he's a sort of person who you'd want on your side in a crisis, and you'd certainly not want on the other side in a crisis. He was very influenced by pre-Reformation Renaissance humanism

as exemplified by Erasmus. Again, can you touch on that? Yeah, I mean, he's one of the people who have really benefited from the rediscovery of Greek and Latin. He's a beautiful stylist in Latin. It speaks beautiful French and beautiful Latin. And you'd think, therefore, that he would have that sort of lightness of touch,

and toleration that Erasmus, the great humanist, was so fond of. But no, that's not the sort of man he was because there's another big man in his life from the remote past. Augustine of Hippo, fourth century, fifth century, Latin-speaking bishop from Africa. Now, the writings of Augustine

tower behind the writings of Calvin, and at each stage in Calvin's writing, you can check it out against Augustine. I mean, there are more than a thousand references to Augustine in the writings of Calvin. Justin Champion, Calvin's theology was focused on the Bible, the scriptures. those were the spectacles, the scriptures or the spectacles,

you saw God and life truly. How radical was this at the time, and how did this shape his thinking? And his writing, because these institutes, Dermens referred to what a beautiful Silas it was, and people who have fluent in French tell me that that's the case. But how, let's talk about it, hid the scriptures and Calvin. I think one of the key things to emphasise picking up on what Dermud said

is that Calvin is trained as a humanist, and one of the great impetus of humanism is to return to sources, Adfantes. And for Calvin it's returning to the text of scripture. So the powerful print culture that he produced in things like the institutes first published in 1536, but still being reprinted right at the end of his life. And we can see his sort of theology evolved just in the size of that book. You know, the theology of grace in the first chapter in the first edition is six pages long. By the time it's in its last edition of 1563, it's 80 pages long. So returning to text, returning to explore what both the Old and the New Testament says about God is absolutely fundamental.

And I think in one sense that's the great power of Calvinism. It says here is the revealed, inerrant word of God. If you encounter it correctly, you will see the Holy Spirit. So his ability, both in the institutes, and then more importantly, in producing vernacular editions of the Bible, the so-called Geneva Bibles, English versions, French versions, that have a very powerful textual apparatus to enable every believer to understand.

As I understand, he learned Hebrew and Greek as well as Latin, so he had all the languages of the old worlds were to look at this text. You talked about the Geneva Bible, it's the notes in the Geneva Bible, which become the most important thing. You've not only got the Bible, but you're told how to read it.

You look at the note, and this is how you read this sentence, this is what this sentence means, and this becomes as important, well, not as important. Anyway, can you talk about that? I think it's one of the great tensions within both the Protestant mind, but certainly within the Calvinist mind, that you have the word of God before you on the printed page, and it is your duty to understand and follow that.

But obviously not every Protestant believer is as educated and as erudite as somebody like Calvin. So using this new technology of print, the authority of proper interpretation is embedded into the margins of the text. And it's James I think who hates these margins. notes, because of course, in certain circumstances, should you obey a tyrant king, should you bow the need to idolaters, the Calvinist sort of commentary makes it very, very clear. So we have... The Parmenist's commoner makes it very clear that you can assassinate a tyrant king. Absolutely.

James I, a first, a divine right man, wasn't terribly fond of. Not to... The marginal notes that slight the text, taking away from the true sort of authority of obedience. And I think with Calvin, we can see in those texts, a virtual verse, of a church authority. We talk about the Geneva Bible. That was mostly Tyndall's translation, wasn't it? In the English language edition,

it's based on the Tyndall translation, but a lot of the exiles from the popish regime in England, people like William Whittingham, end up in Geneva and produce their own language. He spent much of his life in exile in Geneva, as Dermud has said. Can you give us a sense of how he, because he became a man in the city, It wasn't just a man with writing the books and a man studying the Bible.

He was concerned how society, he was concerned with establishing a theocracy, that the city should be the city of God, perhaps back to Augusta. Absolutely. And I think 15,000 people, perhaps 15,000 souls living in Geneva in the 1550s, perhaps it expands to 25,000 later on with all of the Huguenot refugees from persecution. Calvin's objective, although he's very clear that church and state are separate things, The civil state is not really a godly apparatus, although it ought to enable godliness.

The complexity of civic politics, after 1541, when Calvin creates the so-called ecclesiastical ordinances, that create institutions in that city, institutions like the consistory, a court that brings in lay and pastor figures to regulate the moral discipline of that community. So he's setting up his own system inside the city, his own system of law based on his own idea,

of the church? He's exploiting Old Testament moral values, but I think we always need to recognise that cities are quite turbulent places and civil elites always like to establish orders. So there are a lot of regulations that Calvin, if you like, wants to infuse with some moral reformation. He wants to do God's war against sin by using civil institutions. And there's a lot of tension in the two decades that he's in Geneva between those civic authorities and the various Calvinist figures. And, for example, excommunication is a powerful tool of moral discipline that the consistory, the Calvinist Church Court,

wants to use the civic officers in Geneva until 1555 are very reluctant to allow that sort of civil punishment. Susan Hardman, can you give us a sense of early Calvinist worship? If we'd gone into a church in Geneva in the 1540s, what would we have seen? How would it have operated and how influential would it have been on the people of the lives who did go in the church then? I think the first thing to say is actually if you tried to get into the church outside service time, it would be locked. Because Calvin thought it was vital to teach people the right way to worship,

and he didn't want people slipping in on the quiet to say Catholic prayers. We must remember that there was a big push against Catholicism now. We've left that out of their discussion altogether, but he wanted to rid the world, particularly Geneva, of Catholicism. He wanted to re-educate people. into the Protestant way. So when services happened, everyone was expected to be in church, and that would mean two or three times on a Sunday and at least once in the week.

And because everyone was expected to attend, the churches were packed, there were complaints about them being overcrowded. The authorities chased up absentees and took care to ensure there were no rival distractions that the tavern should be shut, the pastry cooks and other street traders should stop crying their wares outside. And if these churches have been Roman Catholic churches, the stained windows would have been removed,

any ornamentation would have been stripped away, and the pews would have been rearranged to be around the pulpit so the word could be concentrated on. That's absolutely right, yes. I think when you went through the door of the church, if you'd been raised a Catholic, it would be a big shock to see the medieval churches, which had been full of colour, stripped bare, back to barestone, whitewashed walls perhaps.

And everything was dominated by the pulpit. As Dermott said earlier, Calvin preached incessantly. And he was a very mesmerising, passionate preacher, often very confrontational. He didn't spare to call the citizens of Geneva part of a cesspool of iniquity and on occasion got hauled before the magistrates and told to Tony down. And the shape of the church was fixed around the pulpit. There were serried ranks of benches, women and children sitting closest and then men further back. Are we talking about a seriously disciplined group of people, even for that time of discipline groups, in religious groups,

who went to this church, who had a serious purpose, who, the city of Geneva would know these were the, not not, it wouldn't be called calvincent of the time. It wouldn't be called calvester. time. These were the reformed Protestants and they were a force to be reckoned with. It wasn't just going to church. It went into their lives. It went into their civic lives. Well, for some of them, certainly it did. Those who, you know, really took up Calvin's message, but a lot of the people who sat in church were there to, in a way, have the word of God served out to them, Calvinist style. And, you know, the effort was to get it home into their hearts and minds. And so the church caught the disciplinary structures of Geneva, tried to chase that up to make sure that

that people were attending the sermons that they knew what they'd heard. The basic form of worship was very, very simple. Bible readings, sermon, prayers and singing psalms, which is very distinctive of reformed worship. But not hymns? Not freely composed hymns. What you've got to do is you've got to sing scripture.

And to make scripture easy to sing, you turn it, you turn the Psalms, into simple poems set to simple tunes. and these become popular outside the church. This is part of what people carry out into their everyday lives. I mean, psalm singing, it's the lullabies and the battle cries of Calvinism as it spreads out beyond Geneva. Before we talk about his ideas, which then people will...

He'd spread very rapidly through Europe. Lutherism was, as it was stuck in Germany and Scandinavia and so on, but the Calvinism seemed to be able to move around. Why was that? It moved into all of Europe. It came. It played a very big part in this country. It went across to America and New England, so on. What gave it that flexibility and mobility? It's not quite as clear cut in terms of Lutheranism, because Lutheranism, of course, now is spread all over the world. But certainly in the second half of the 16th century, Calvinism spread was much more rapid. Calvin always had an international outlook. He was never narrowly focused on Geneva. I think that came from his own experience of living as an exile. And Calvin realized that if reforms take root in different contexts, it had to be adaptable. At one point he said to someone who wrote to him for advice,

don't make an idol of me or a Jerusalem of Geneva. It wasn't vital to follow the Genevaan blueprint right down to the last letter. I think one strand in Calvinism that made it. adaptable was its ability to put down roots even where rulers were hostile. Justin referred earlier to the strand in Calvinist theology that allowed resistance to rulers. And that meant that Calvinism, more than Lutheranism, had the capacity to inspire revolutionary reformations, such as, for example, Knox in Scotland. Well, there's the elephant that's in the room we haven't spoken about, and that's his ideas, his theology. So let's get to grips with that.

Damon McCulloch, let's look at this theology. What's at the heart of his theology? I'd say the majesty of God, the sovereignty of God, the feeling that God does everything and you and I are hopeless, fallen beings, and God in his mercy lifts some of us up. Not all, but some of us, and that's the great key, that God has decided who is going to be saved, and also, of course, who's going to be damned? Because God is... all perfect, therefore he never changes his mind, therefore he must make one decision. It would be perfect. Exactly. If he changes his mind, it wouldn't be perfect. So he must have made one decision once to save or to damn. We all ought to be damned because we don't deserve to be

saved. So he's really giving an act of mercy to save some of us. The idea of God being majestic and perfect and man being worthless, as you said earlier, goes back to St. Augustine. He draws a lot from that. Can you just say a little bit more about that? Why is that so powerful in Calvin's mind. And how does he refresh it? Well, why in Calvin's mind, I think it's just a thing about Western Latin Christianity, that this

idea of Augustine's, which is back to Paul, this is that the tragedy of humanity is that it fell in the Garden of Eden. And if you've got this very powerful idea, it keeps jumping back into Christianity at various points.

It's there in Augustine, and the contrasting impulse to generosity about the human condition is always sort of fighting with that. And you might see the Reformation in the 16th century as one of those upsurges of that pessimism which Augustine had had. Suddenly it's back with Calvin.

And I think perhaps, if I'm just saying add something about that, it's because he's a lawyer. And he feels that God is like the sort of judge whom he respects as a lawyer, making pitiless but fair decisions about human capacity, at the given condition.

We are talking about a time when religious thought dominated intellectual thought and people thought through religion even though perhaps we can look back and interpret it in different ways.

So this is the canopy as it were for all discussed thought and most of it in the area we're talking about in most of you. Justin Chapman, let's talk about this idea

of predestination which term is right. Let's push it. I mean, just say simply what it is and why you thought it was so powerful. I think we need to think

about the context first and the traditional Catholic theology allows both the individual to exercise through some measure of free will to enable some form of grace to be attracted for their own salvation. They may do that in partnership with the church and the whole Lutheran Calvinist critique of Roman Catholicism as a sort of redundant, superstitious activity is at the core of what Calvin's interested in. So Calvin's understanding of predestination is deduced from his understanding of the absolute power of God. So the doctrine

of double predestination isn't there in a bold sense. Double predestination? Both that you are condemned to die in rot in hell forever, but also are saved. So I think that there's a lot of appallingly technical theology. And I think one of the things that

we always need to remember is Calvinism is a university theology. And when we get into places like Cambridge where there are huge sort of thesis written on precisely whether those who are condemned to damnation and those who are condemned to be,

who are saved, are done so before the creation of the world, before Adam is created, the whole series of very technical arguments about when God's absolute grace functions. But the core thing is, human beings can't do anything about it. And the role of the church, I think,

becomes not something that enables salvation, but it enables edification and repentance. So the structure of the church is aimed at achieving a very different set of moral disciplines rather than some sort of sacramental process. Susan, how does predestination fit in with the idea of God's providence? I think we need to see predestination within a broader framework of Calvin's understanding of providence. That is God's love constantly active, not only on the big canvas of creation and history, but also in the nitty-gritty of individual lives.

devout 17th century Calvinists, you know, a bee sting or a fall from a horse could be an act of God's providence. They wanted to make all of life a story of God's parental care. I can think of a story of a woman who, her husband wants her to migrate to New England in the sort of Calvinist move over there in the 1630s. She's pregnant, she doesn't want to go, she'd rather stay at home. but then her child is born and dies, and she asks God why, and God says, because you wouldn't go to New England. Now, we might say what kind of God would deliver a message via the death of a child? But to this woman, Susanna Bell, Providence helped to make sense of adversity and give shape and direction to her life. And I think both Providence and predestination were really meant to give.

comfort. That was the fundamental drive to give comfort. But what happened, particularly with predestination, was that people started to worry very much about how exactly the decree of election played out in real time in their lives. Yes, Dermit, this is a crunch, isn't it, really, that some of them, some of us, some of them were elected. They were predestined to be saved. Some were not. Now, first of all, how do they recognize that? And when they did recognise it, what do they do with it? It seems a fatal flaw in both ways, doesn't it? That's the trouble. I mean, it does make you terribly, terribly conscious of everything you do. And that's a paradox because the Reformation had started with Luther worrying about everything he did and thinking,

no, this can't be right. I want to be released from that. And Luther's breakthrough was about feeling that he was in the hands of God and therefore nothing mattered. He was saved by God's But the trouble about this predestination idea and the Providence idea is it gets you back to thinking about every little detail. And one of the paradoxes of this or one of the interesting little facts about it is that the diary, the sort of confessional diary we often write these days, was first a reformed Protestant thing, Calvinist thing. English Puritans wrote diaries to examine their lives and see whether each part of their day checked out that they were in fact elect. But there were great tiger traps, weren't that? If you thought you were one of the elect, why should you bother to do anything at all?

You were the elect, that was that. God had decided it before you were born. And in Hogg's confession of a justified sinner, you could go and murder people. Yes, James Hogg did a wonderful parody of this. Yes. If you feel you're elect, you can do anything you like. Well, of course, they worried about that. They worried incessantly about it.

But how did Calvin get rounded? Because he obviously knew that that was a problem. Well, he would say that there were circumstances in which God would give you a false confidence that you were elect, that you were in fact one of the damned, but you acted in ways that might look like the elect, and therefore you must guard against that hypocrisy all the time. And also, you must be good because you're grateful to God for being elect. And so good actions actually flow from the fact that you're grateful to God. They both want to get in. Can I just ask, who told you? How did you know you were elect?

I think that that's one of the fundamental problems. It's a huge salvation anxiety. There are lots of ways one can think around this. Augustine confronts some of the same problems with the pure brethren of his own time, who claim, I'm saved, therefore I do what I want. I don't have to obey anybody. Good trees bear good fruits. And one of the things Calvinists in Geneva and elsewhere believe is, in some sense, if you can show that you are acting in a positive moral, sinless way, you may have a little bit more assurance.

But of course, right at the core of all of this, nobody actually knows. And I've always wondered, if you're in front of a congregation in your preaching, and you've done the sums, there may be nobody in the congregation who's saved. The sums being only one in a thousand will be saved, and only one man, one woman in 100,000 or something. So you could be preaching to the damned. Those I think are sort of rhetorical exaggerates. I know, but they're in, they're in...

Yeah, they are. They're in print. Yeah. I think there's a framework in Calvin's theology that's important to bear in mind here, which is that Calvin gave more emphasis to the law, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, than Luther had done. for Calvin, discipline, law was a sort of spur to the horse.

It was a spur to kick Christians on into living a holy life. He made room for law and discipline in a way that Luther rather avoided, because Luther was so keen to avoid the idea of works that, you know, faith was everything. But for Calvin, salvation in Christ involves being made holy, as well as being saved by faith in Christ. What attracted... Sorry, you say what you want to say, Damon.

Well, I just want to follow on from that, really. I think what we're all saying is that reformed Protestants like Calvin are very driven people, very busy people, because they're worried about themselves, and therefore they check out their inactions, and they're very active. And one of the fruits of that activism may be that they're very good at business, but it may be all sorts of things. And you raise the subject of why suddenly does all this suddenly erupt in the mid-16th century? I think it's this, that this theology is very empowering.

It gives you anxiety, but it also fills you with excitement and exultation. It's also Pandora's box. You say, study the Bible for yourself. You say we're giving you notes. We say you're allowing you to comment, and then someone did and disagreed with you. And Calvin himself, in the rather tragic case of Michael Servetus. I don't believe that. Calvin believes he knows the truth.

Calvin uses his erudition and his interminable sermonising to expose the truth of the Holy Spirit. And he doesn't really broke any hostility towards that. And one of the Calvinist traditions is to have a common creed that everybody might subscribe to. Michael Servetus reads his Bible too. In fact, he reads his edition of Calvin's Institutes and marks that way he thinks he's got it wrong. Servetus doesn't believe in a Trinity. this is probably a mean way to put it, but I think Calvin lures servetus out of the clutches of the Spanish Inquisition

who want to execute him for impiety. Offers him save haven. And then ends up putting him on trial and executing him. So in one sense this is a profoundly intolerant act, but I think we've always got to remember, and this is why Calvinism is so attractive, if you believe the book you have in front of you, is the word of God,

and it's going to save you for, eternity, you've no choice but to believe it. Susan. It's interesting to contrast what happened with Calvin and Sepetus, though, with what happens in the 1650s with Cromwell and Cromwell's religious toleration. Cromwell was

very intolerant of intolerance and he didn't like blasphemy but he thought, well, why condemn and punish someone when they probably already sent themselves on the road to hell? And when the character called John Biddle,

came up with an attack on the Trinity, rather like Savitas. What Cromwell did was to ship him off to the Silly Isles, give him a pension, and leave him there to stew and think about it. Yeah, I think that's one of the most interesting things about reformed Protestantism, that it's so seized by ideas. And yes, it has its terrible intolerances, its harsh discipline. But these are people who really value truth, and they explore truth. And one of the things about the late 17th century is that the Enlightenment,

which we often think of as an anti-Christian thing, was not. It was the product of reformed Protestants, of anxious Jews, of people who really value religion and want to get it right, a bit like Michael Servetus. I don't want to get there yet. Why do people want to join this? Why do people want to join this?

It sounds a pretty tough passage through life. I think they wanted shape. We've already talked about shape. They wanted a structure. This is a very anxious world in which there is very little discipline. And the end of the world is supposed to be nice, The end of the world's nice.

You've got to get things right. This is very important, isn't it? People are inventing logarithms to work out exactly when it will come. Napier. Indeed, yes. John Napier created logarithms, so you calculate the end of the world. So it really is important to get society right. I think that's one very important dimension.

Not so much to Calvin, actually, who doesn't get excited by the last days, but his followers do. And they regard life as a great battle between good and evil, Pope on one side, them on the other. But shape and discipline, those church courts, we've talked about, really important. Susan? As well as the discipline, we often think of Calvinism as very arid and dry

as dust, but there was a very mystical, sensual streak to Calvinist spirituality. The Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford liked to talk about himself as a bride of Christ, using language from the Song of Songs, Christ the bridegroom of the soul, how sweet is a fresh kiss from his holy mouth. And, you know, I think these people were actually

engaged in a quest for enjoyment of God. They would speak of being ravished by joy. It might seem rather weird to us that they got up at the crack of dawn to read and meditate. But they were continuing in a way in a different guise, some of the spiritual disciplines of Catholic medieval spirituality. They like to think of themselves as pilgrims, but it was a pilgrimage lived out amid the hazards of everyday life. And John Bunyan took the great second bestseller after the Bible, took that into Pilgrin's Freregris. Justin Champion, they had, Calvin's beliefs had a major impact in England. Let's just go to the Civil War. Cromwell's been mentioned. The Geneva Bible, Pocket Bible, was taken into those wars by,

let's call them Cromwell's side, and I put it that way. Can you give us a sense of how transformative this could be, especially in helping to create that turmoil, that war, and then in transforming it into something, the society, into something else. I think if we think about the two, three decades that lead up to the outbreak of war in the 1640s, the power of having local elites and local congregations in parishes all over the British Isles in big cities like London, where there are groups of very radically committed Puritans, Calvinists, who want to do God's work, yet see the agent of the Antichrist and Popery everywhere,

contaminating the church but also contaminating the crown. I think this is a driving force of a lot of that religious conflict. And in there, they have a king who's married a Catholic wife and threatens to bring Protestant England back to Catholicism. Exactly. And I think, you know, we could talk about Archbishop Lord, the sort of defender of particular tradition of Anglicanism. It's certainly not a Roman Catholic, but to this Calvinist worldview, he certainly is. And I think the whole Calvinist tradition also provides a set of revolutionary texts.

The Geneva Bible itself is very clear on how you deal with idolatrous, superstitious tyrants. But a whole series of texts from the 1560s and 70s, the vindicay contra tyrannos, the Franco Gallia, are all reprinted in the 1640s. They're reprinted in the 1680s. They're reprinted in the 1770s. So they become handbooks of revolution that fundamentally say obey God. not man, do God's work. You mentioned, Diamond, you mentioned the way that this theology took hold.

You also referred to the Jewish intellectuals, as well as the Calvinists, as it were, stirring up the Enlightenment. Can we before we get to that, talk about the relationship they had, Calvinism had with the history of Israel, as it were? Well, yeah, back to exile, you see. Calvin is not the only exile. Reform Protestants tend to have to flee a lot. and so as they flee, they regard themselves, just like Israel, being sent by God to a particular place against their will. But that's God's will, and that's part of their internationalism. So they identify quite a lot with the Jews, and on the whole, they're rather more well-disposed to the Jews than other Western Christians. And there is a sense in which they both go through the same experiences.

They're battered for their faith. Very often their faith changes because of that experience. it gets harder, but sometimes it gets more generous, more open, to the idea of toleration. It's the reformed Protestant world, which is always trying to reach out, for instance, to the Lutherans who hate them, to say, well, we must get together, we must for a proper church, particularly, of course, because the last day is going to happen. Can we just go back to the power of it, it's effected in the civil war, because that was an enormous thing, the king, a king who thought he was divinely appointed, thought he was the law above the war. the law, which is one of the reasons why he fared so badly in his trial, I think, a lot of people think. He was beheaded, a state was turned upside down. The translation of the Bible in English had given people a language and a possibility of imagery and instances to speak in

debating political terms through the Bible. So it was a turmoil, a period of turmoil and excitement, and Calvinism was a very powerful part in that. Absolutely. And all of the traditions we've been talking about Providence, England as a sort of forum for Israel, all come to effect, most obviously, in the brutal wars. You are fighting for God's cause if you're in the New Model Army. Of course, if you're in the Royalist side, you think you're fighting for a different God, but the same one.

And pocket Bibles take extracts from the Old Testament about where the tribe of Israel defeat your ungodliness. And the soldiers who are fighting that war believe they are doing God's work. Cromwell is obsessed with Providence, but he doesn't know what's right. So he talks about constantly sitting at the edge of prophecy. He's not quite sure which way God wants him to go.

God wants to create godly reformation. So the reform of Parliament is driven very much by those disciplinary ambitions. So we have a holy parliament in bare-bones parliament, the rule of the saints. There's a Westminster Confession that beautifully set, out the Calvinist sort of theology and institutions,

although not very many people buy it or in fact worship under it. So it is a great experimental period. Susan, Susan Harbin, can you tell us what happened when the Calvinist doctrine reached America? A great number of very educated, very dedicated people of the book sailed from Britain and other places.

Let's stick with us. Thousands and thousands of them to what became New England. What happened then? To the faith we're talking about as much as you. Yeah. Around 20. thousand people sailed across the Atlantic

to New England in the 1630s and it was a very family-centred migration. You've got to think of them all packed into the boats with their goods and chattels for maybe up to 12 weeks. Arguably this was a flight from the anti-Calvinist policies of Charles I. Certainly that was the way

many of them saw it. When they finally stepped on shore in New England in incredibly tough conditions, they really wanted to create pure churches. They felt they had a unique chance to do this from scratch in a new world. If I had to single out one innovation that they made that was a real step change from

anything in Calvinism so far, it would be this that only settlers who could give a convincing and detailed personal testimony of the work of God in their lives could join the church. So they made this testimony of religious experience a test. So you had an exam to get in the church. Well, you had an exam. And I mentioned the woman Susanna Bell earlier who had that traumatic decision to leave England because of the death of her child.

When she, after all that, comes to New England and gives her testimony to her neighbours who are already members of the church, they turn her down. They say she can't show clearly enough the work of grace in her life and she runs round from preacher to preacher trying to find out where she's gone wrong.

She is eventually admitted. And, you know, it may be that although this test sounds harsh that actually it played a good role in letting people tell their stories to each other and building community. But this almost terrifying rigor dug Calvinism into the way America developed intellectually and religiously. And although several of them came back, as you pointed out, and what I read from yours is, about a quarter of people came back. Those who stayed, this religion drove into what became. in the United States?

Yeah. Reform Protestantism is people's religion. Wherever it settles, it's people's religion. And if you've got a new people, they've got all the imagery of Israel available. They've got that driving sense of being God's people. Of course, the unfortunate thing about America is there are already people there. And it's rather easy to fit them into the role of Canaanites being driven out. And I think that's a constant feature of the American psyche. That's one of the reasons why politics still in America have this.

feeling of the other, because the other was there when these settlers landed. Justin? I mean, I think that's true. America is a very pluralist sort of religious landscape. But of course, the founding fathers in the 18th century, people like Franklin, are absolutely insistent that the state must be value-free of religion, even though there are lots of competing communities who want to impose their own godly sense. But you do find that a much.

American politicians will still go back to John Winthrop's words right at the beginning, that New England must be America must be a city on a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. I mean, my take on that is that Winthrop was actually much more nervy. He was, you know, saying a city on a hill is exposed. We better get this right or risk the judgment of God. But certainly still the founding fathers play an important part in American political rhetoric. It's interesting how these religiously.

I'm very sorry to interrupt you. It's interesting how the religious ideas so soon as it were transformed themselves into political ideas, isn't it? Yes, well, right from the start, it's a very political religion. In Geneva it's political. And we talked earlier about the separation

of the church in Geneva from the city of Geneva. They have to work together, but they are separate. And that, I think, is built into reform Protestantism. It can detach itself to do the work of God from the government. And that's, of course, what happens in the United States.

I think one of the beautiful things about Calvinism is it's incredibly adaptable. So if we're thinking about Calvinism in Geneva, we can see there's a certain sort of community and relationship with civic authorities. If we go to somewhere like Scotland and Knox in the later 16th century, there's a huge sort of connection

between civic magistracy and those sort of religious ambitions. And when the two come together, it's an incredibly powerful social movement. Briefly, you mentioned it earlier, Adam. Can you just say, refer again to your ideas that Calvinism lay the ground for the Enlightenment?

I think what's important about reform Protestantism is that it's got an engagement with a book. It takes words very seriously and truth very seriously. And it also takes for individual judgment very seriously. You're alone with the Bible. And who knows what will happen? And poor Michael Servetus found that out. And in the 17th centuries,

people started looking at the Bible and saying problems. And there's problems at the heart of the Enlightenment. and the answers to those problems at their heart of the Enlightenment. And do the ideas, can you talk a little bit more about how the ideas pour through the Enlightenment, Justin? I mean, I think, again, we don't want to turn the Enlightenment into one sort of movement. And, you know, Calvin isn't clearly exceptionally important in driving one sort of view of it.

But the ideas that religious values create powerful sort of economic circumstances is one of the traditions that we can see being studied in some of the philosophical dimensions of the Enlightenment that of course carries through into modern debates about calling and Calvinism having a particular connection with capitalism. And there won't be time to talk about it, but Susan, but just to refer, you had a big impact on literature. Again, Devin mentioned earlier,

the turning towards self-examination, confessional, and so on. Yes, I mean, I think people wanted to tell the story of their life with God as the author. That was the sort of Calvinist thrust. And that then translates into all kinds. of literature. Can you, I mean, I briefly mentioned John Bunyan Pilgrim's

Progress before. That was the outstanding example, isn't it? Yes. I mean, what Bunyan does is to take theology and turn it into a story. I mean, he uses brilliantly images to create a narrative for an individual

pilgrim to live as a hero. Justin. And I think just drawing on that point, reading was at the core of what it was to be Calvinist, reading scripture, thinking, almost a therapeutic action of returning to the text and connecting it with your life. That's why it's so powerful.

Well, thank you very much. Justin Champion, Damon McCulloch and Susan Hardman Moore. Thank you very much indeed. Next week, we'll be talking about the infant brain. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four