Calvinist Debates on History

Abstract

From the mid-sixteenth century, the emergent Calvinist movement was actively engaged in the massive ‘turn to history’ generated by both confessional camps of the Reformation crisis, in their doctrinal and subsequently military and political confrontation that escalated into religious war. Following the lead of their Lutheran counterparts, Calvinist historians ascribed the confrontation in the broader, providential plan, while at the same time attempting to incorporate the national histories of their countries in the narrative of the opposition against Roman theological and political tyranny. Despite Calvin’s original distancing from the prophetic/apocalyptic discourse dominant in the Lutheran camp, the cataclysmic events ushered in by the escalation of the Reformation crisis, especially in France, generated a return to the prophetic/apocalyptic discourse of ecclesiastical history, historia sacra. With the sole exception of Lancelot Voisin de la Popelinière, Calvinist historians in the late sixteenth century sought consolation and encouragement in the providential history of the true, universal Church.