Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.34
A. Goudriaan
Analysing a number of interactions between Calvinists and Early Enlightenment philosophers—and the receptions of John Calvin in these—this chapter shows a complex and persistent presence of Calvin and Calvinists in philosophical debates during the early Enlightenment period. Among Calvinists, Descartes found both opponents and followers. Reformed Cartesians have occasionally appealed to Calvin (e.g. on accommodation and the sensus divinitatis), praised the Reformer (Heidanus, Burman), or neglected him (van Til). The philosopher Arnold Geulincx has been protected (Heidanus.) and published (van Til) by Calvinists, before they began to associate him with Spinoza (Tuinman, Andala, Driessen). Thomas Hobbes quoted Calvin incidentally, but Calvinists usually opposed his philosophy. Thus, the jurist Ulrik Huber used Calvin’s teachings on the testimonium Spiritus sancti against Hobbes—an appeal to Calvin that Huber repeated against another philosopher’s claim that reason alone was able to demonstrate the divinity of scripture. In order to refute Spinozists, Reformed minister Carolus Tuinman translated Calvin’s treatise against the libertines (1545). Responding to Huguenot Pierre Bayle, the Lutheran philosopher G. W. Leibniz wrote favourably about Calvin’s teachings on predestination and providence, as he had done also about Calvin’s views on the Eucharist.
本章分析了加尔文主义者和早期启蒙运动哲学家之间的一些互动,以及约翰·加尔文在这些互动中的接受情况,显示了加尔文和加尔文主义者在早期启蒙运动时期的哲学辩论中复杂而持久的存在。在加尔文主义者中,笛卡尔发现了反对者和追随者。改革后的笛卡儿派偶尔会求助于加尔文(例如,关于迁就和神感论),赞扬改革家(海达努斯,布尔曼),或忽视他(范蒂尔)。哲学家阿诺德·葛林克斯(Arnold Geulincx)在加尔文主义者开始将他与斯宾诺莎(Spinoza)联系在一起之前,一直受到保护(Heidanus)和出版(van Til)。托马斯·霍布斯顺便引用了加尔文的话,但加尔文主义者通常反对他的哲学。因此,法学家乌尔里克·休伯(Ulrik Huber)用加尔文的证词《神圣精神》(Spiritus sancti)来反对霍布斯——休伯反复向加尔文呼吁,反对另一位哲学家的主张,即只有理性才能证明圣经的神性。为了反驳斯宾诺莎主义者,改革宗牧师卡洛勒斯·图因曼翻译了加尔文反对自由主义者的论文(1545)。路德派哲学家莱布尼茨(G. W. Leibniz)在回应胡格诺派皮埃尔·贝利(Pierre Bayle)时,对加尔文关于宿命论和天意的教义表示赞赏,就像他对加尔文关于圣餐的观点所做的那样。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.24
J. Wood
In the midst of the roiling chaos of the nineteenth century, Abraham Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism was a strategy to maintain a Calvinist unity and engagement with an increasingly disintegrated Western world. The unity Kuyper pursued was of two kinds: intellectual and social. As a thinker, Kuyper valued coherent, interrelated systems. He took as his starting point the systematic Calvinism of Protestant scholastics and the Reformed Confessions as well as Romanticism’s organic impulse which elevated the organic and natural over mechanical and artificial. In addition to a unified mind, Kuyper also pursued a unified Calvinist community, albeit a different kind than imagined by earlier Calvinists. Under the pressures of modernity, Kuyper didn’t pursue a repristinated Calvinist culture, but a renewed Calvinist subculture.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.41
Emily Theus
This chapter considers the doctrines of providence and sin in the Institutes of Christian Religion in order to draw out Calvin’s views on the interplay of human and divine agency. Calvin’s account of God’s particular providence establishes the basic conditions for human responsibility and characterizes God’s agency as perfectly efficacious—so much so that the relationship between God’s willing and evil/sin cannot adequately be captured through language of ‘permission’. The doctrine of sin further inflects this account, clarifying the relationship between human freedom, necessity, and responsibility for sin. The result is a challenging picture, in which humans are responsible for sin, but not for good, and in which God is causally determinative of both good and evil. The key to this account—to understanding its perplexities and to identifying what features of meaningful human action are at stake—is the nesting of intentions within a layering of human and divine agency.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.22
C. Trueman
John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine posed a serious challenge to Protestants with regard to how they understood the doctrinal history of the church. One robust response came from the Scottish Presbyterian theologian, William Cunningham, who subjected Newman to vigorous critique on the basis of classical Reformation notions of scriptural authority. Nevertheless, Cunningham failed to understand the seriousness of the challenge of history and others, notable the Mercersburg theologians, offered approaches that point towards a more satisfactory approach.
{"title":"Classical Calvinism and the Problem of Development","authors":"C. Trueman","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.22","url":null,"abstract":"John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine posed a serious challenge to Protestants with regard to how they understood the doctrinal history of the church. One robust response came from the Scottish Presbyterian theologian, William Cunningham, who subjected Newman to vigorous critique on the basis of classical Reformation notions of scriptural authority. Nevertheless, Cunningham failed to understand the seriousness of the challenge of history and others, notable the Mercersburg theologians, offered approaches that point towards a more satisfactory approach.","PeriodicalId":296358,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129723142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.17
H. Nellen
This chapter discusses the confessional controversies on biblical authority and ecclesiastical tradition in the first half of the seventeenth century. While Protestant theologians upheld the status of the Bible as a divinely inspired, unique, coherent, and self-evident source of faith and stressed the subordinate significance of the patristic legacy, the Roman Catholic camp embraced the importance of the teachings of the Church Fathers, conciliar decrees, and papal decisions as a rock-solid criterion for a sound interpretation of the Bible. On the basis of treatises authored by eminent and hard-core exponents of Calvinism like Abraham Scultetus, Jean Daillé, Louis Cappel, and André Rivet, set against the views of the Jesuit Denis Pétau, expert in the history of the primitive church, it is argued that debates led to a reciprocal undermining of viewpoints, which eventually paved the way for more radical positions at the end of the century.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.11
William A. Dyrness
Recent scholarship on the arts and the Reformation has come to focus more broadly on the cultural reconstruction the Reformation made necessary and the resulting material and visual culture. Calvin’s challenge in Geneva was not about what the Reformation had left behind but what would replace that medieval world. Key for Calvin was the experience of worship: the oral performance of the sermon, the singing of Psalms and partaking the sacraments, as a dramatic call enabled by the Holy Spirit summoning worshippers to a vision of God and God’s presence in the world. The regular communal worship and the preached drama of sin and salvation constituted the aesthetic-dramatic mirror (Turner) of the emerging Protestant imagination. This encouraged a mutual caring for the needy but also carried deep aesthetic implications. In the Netherlands this imagination is evident in the placement of textualized images in churches, and in landscape paintings and portraits, and, in France, it stimulated Huguenot architects to recover classical orders in the service of restoring to the earth its Edenic beauty.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.38
Heber Campos
The recent widespread interest in the Reformed faith among evangelicals in Brazil raises the question of how much Calvinism entered and established itself in this country. Brazilian Presbyterianism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appears to have been more conservative evangelical, more anti-Roman Catholic, than distinctively Reformed. The twenty-first-century interest in the Reformed faith among many evangelicals from different denominations (including a greater interest among Presbyterians) comes through four avenues: literature, conferences, media, and theological schools. However, the variegated use of the terms ‘Reformed’ and ‘Calvinism’ allows the conclusion that many elements that have composed this historical tradition have not been widely rediscovered. In order for Brazilians further to understand Calvinism, there needs to be a discovery of its rich legacy in biblical-hermeneutical, historical-dogmatic, as well as pastoral studies.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.42
Alexander D. Batson
This chapter argues that the concept of equity plays a crucial role in Calvin’s early writings, especially in the Commentary on Seneca and the 1536 edition of the Institutes. Calvin embraces two distinct yet inseparable meanings of the term ‘equity’. One sense is as an interpretative principle of natural law, and the goal at which all civil law aims. The other sense is an application of the interpretative sense, in which a ruler or judge amends a civil law that is too strict or too general to take into account all the particularities of a certain case. Calvin’s concept of equity displays both his humanist legal training as well as the critical place of natural law in his theology.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.43
Pierrick Hildebrand
Today, covenant theology is often equated with Calvinism. The study of Calvin’s own use of the biblical covenant motive, however, has generated a controversial interpretation of the Reformed tradition. While some scholars have recently denied Calvin a genuine theology of the covenant, so as to oppose him to Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) and the covenant theology developed in Zurich, this chapter emphasizes Calvin’s positive reception and integration of Zurich’s theology in his Institutes. Even if Calvin did not himself significantly contribute to the development of covenant theology, he ensured Bullinger’s theology gained an enduring place within Calvinism.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198728818.013.40
Robert Harkins
This chapter examines English understandings of Calvin and Calvinism during the reign of Elizabeth I. In particular, it focuses on the ‘Admonition Controversy’ of the 1570s, when puritan demands for further reformation stoked disputes with official church leadership. The dispute began in 1572 with the appearance of a pair of incendiary pro-Presbyterian pamphlets, the Admonition to the Parliament and the Second Admonition to the Parliament, but would continue for decades, and is now largely known for the long-running theological debate that ensued between John Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright. An examination of the roots of the controversy, however, reveals that perceptions of Calvinism in England were coloured by far more than a shared doctrinal outlook or theological consensus. For some of the Elizabethan bishops, most especially, Calvin and the Genevan model of reformation were not only associated with an uncomfortable history of religious conflict, but were also tainted by a political theology that had the potential to destabilize the English state.
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