In the Vanguard of the 1930s Reformed Resurgence

Abstract

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have manifested a large-scale revival of interest in John Calvin, Reformed Theology and popular forms of Calvinism. Journalists have scrambled to grasp the parentage of a movement which had so long been out of the public view. Sympathetic Christian writers have developed a range of hypotheses about the roots of this resurgence, with most concentrating on developments unfolding since the mid-twentieth century. This essay maintains that the actual roots of the contemporary Calvinist resurgence lie in the period following the Great War (1914–1918), when three distinguishable streams of Protestant thought found common ground and for a period of at least a quarter-century collaborated to draw attention to the resources offered in the broadly Reformed theological tradition.