The origins of the earliest Reformed churches defied a general pattern. Individual clergy came to Protestant convictions through circuitous routes, members of city councils calculated the spiritual, political, and economic benefits of reform, and the combined efforts of clergy and magistrates produced reformations that bore the imprint of local settings. To be sure, Luther’s struggle with Rome and the reforms promoted by humanists functioned as banks to channel the surging waters of reform. But the idiosyncratic character of Reformed Protestantism’s beginnings meant that new churches lacked common characteristics that could identify them, at least initially, as a distinct version of Christianity. Ironically, the very political circumstances that could have ended reform also required Protestant ministers to explain their efforts to magistrates, kings, and emperors in ways that would supply the coherence that the diversity of local settings could not.
The Tetrapolitan Confession (1530) was one of the earliest Reformed declarations of a Protestant identity distinct from Lutheranism. Its very name indicated that it was the statement of faith for four cities - Strasbourg, Canstance, Memmingen, and Lindau, all of them imperial - in preparation for the 1530 meeting of the Imperial Diet of Augsburg. Unlike prior Reformed statements, such as Zwingli’s Sixty-Seven Articles, or the Ten Theses of Bern, the Tetrapolitan Confession spoke for a set of churches beyond one location, and hence achieved a working theological, liturgical, and ecclesial consensus. The particular occasion for this confession written primarily by Martin Bucer along with Wolfgang Capito - both from Strasbourg - was the need to arrive at a Protestant alternative to the Lutheran position affirmed in the Augsburg Confession (also prepared for the approaching imperial diet). For this gathering of Germany’s rulers, Zwingli also prepared a separate statement. The pastors of the four imperial cities were not satisfied with either Lutheran or Zwinglian teaching and so proposed their own.
Although the members of the diet rejected both Zwingli’s statement and the Tetrapolitan Confession, and even though the four cities responsible for the latter would be forced in 1531 to adopt the Augsburg Confession, these Reformed cities produced the first confession to speak for multiple locations that was Protestant but not Lutheran. As such, the Tetrapolitan Confession articulated themes that were foundational to Reformed Protestantism. At the heart of these concerns was a new understanding of the sufficiency of Christ for salvation, which in turn elevated Scripture alone as the rule for faith.
One of the apparently most unusual aspects of the Tetrapolitan Confession was the devotion of four chapters - out of a total of twenty-two - to the question of food. Of course, the Reformation in Zurich had begun with the consumption of sausage on a Friday during Lent as an act of defiance against Rome’s prescription of fasts and holy days. Observers of Protestantism might have chalked up such activity to immaturity or foolish zeal. Instead, that consumption of meat was a principle that captured one of Reformed Protestantism’s chief features, namely, that the church could only require of Christians not what pious clerics thought best but what Scripture itself required. In a chapter devoted to “The Choice of Meats” the Tetrapolitan Confession appealed to the teaching of the apostle Paul, who condemned those in the early church who insisted on abstaining from meat offered to idols. According to Paul, such teaching was the doctrine of demons, because it denied the goodness of everything God had created and granted a power to the church - to bind consciences - that belonged only to God (Art. 9). As the Tetrapolitan Confession testified in its chapter on “The Commanding of Fasts,” churchmen went beyond Scripture in commanding abstinence from certain foods on specified days. In turn, the effort of reformation was to free the “necks” of Christians from these “snares” (Art. 8). Reformed Protestants were not opposed to fasts per se. In fact, the confession complained that Rome’s fasts were superficial in teaching abstinence from a specified list of foods rather than teaching the value of “chastising the flesh” by denying all “dainties” for a time (Art. 9). Still, fasting could not merit salvation. “We must fast, that we may the better pray and keep the flesh within duty, not that we may deserve anything for ourselves before God” (Art.10).
By the time Reformed pastors felt compelled (primarily by politics) to draft another statement, justifications for sausage were absent but food was still important, particularly the characteristics of the bread and wine at the Lord’s Supper. Geneva and Zurich maintained at times an uneasy alliance owing to different emphases regarding the nature of Christ’s presence in the sacrament. 1 In 1549 the churches of Zurich and Geneva wrote the Consensus Tigurinus to overcome disputes about the Lord’s Supper. The occasion was Calvin’s own effort, along with Bucer, to secure a working agreement among Reformed and
Lutherans. Lutherans themselves were divided between the gnesio-Lutherans (following Luther) and the Philippists (following Melanchthon). By the mid1530s Luther and Melanchthon had been able to come to terms, and because Reformed ministers such as Calvin and Bucer had been cordial with Melanchthon, the hope was to overcome the differences between Zwingli and Luther. Ministers in Zurich, however, were leery of Geneva’s overtures to the Lutherans. For the sake of maintaining solidarity among the Swiss, Calvin went to Zurich in 1549 to write the Consensus Tigurinus with Heinrich Bullinger’s input and approval. It eventually received affirmation from the churches at Bern.
The document was devoted almost exclusively to the Lord’s Supper. Of the twenty-six articles, all but the last six addressed a general framework for understanding the nature and purpose of both baptism and the Lord’s Supper. True to its name, the Consensus came with compromises on each side. It was flexible enough to allow for Geneva’s teaching about a physical eating of a spiritual reality through faith by the operation of the Holy Spirit. It also permitted Zurich’s contention that the spiritual reality of the Lord’s Supper was more (or less) independent of the physical elements. Even if rapprochement depended more on the physical text than on the spirit behind the words, the Consensus was important for outlining a sacramental theology that was distinct from both Rome’s and Wittenberg’s.
Zurich was at the center of another effort to arrive at a Reformed consensus only a few years after Calvin’s passing (1564). This time the creed that emerged was the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), Bullinger’s statement of faith from the early 1560s that he intended for Zurich’s city council to use as his will (a plague was threatening the city at the time). Within five years, having survived the plague, Bullinger sent the Confession to Frederick III of the Palatinate to explain to the rest of Germany’s electors the nature of the Christianity that was taking root in Heidelberg. The Second Helvetic also circulated to other Reformed churches throughout Europe and gained their approval. Given its wide reading and approval, the Second Helvetic Confession was the “most authoritative statement” of Reformed Protestantism for the second generation of reformers. 2 It also became the standard theological basis for ordination among the Swiss Protestant churches.
Although the Reformation’s political uncertainties were still pressing, the Second Helvetic Confession used less space than previous creeds to explain differences to confused and alarmed magistrates. Instead, it summarized positively and comprehensively the teaching, worship, and polity of Reformed Protestants. For all of its positive content, the Second Helvetic Confession was not silent on the practices and underlying theories that had prompted opposition to Rome. It devoted a chapter to prayer, which included congregational
singing, public prayers, and canonical hours. Earlier objections to Rome’s requirements on fasting also received a separate chapter that identified Sunday as the holy day and rejected Rome’s church calendar. These Reformed convictions looked less antagonistic than earlier creedal formulas, however, because they ran alongside other chapters on practical religious duties, such as catechesis, comforting the sick, adiaphra (i.e. matters not governed by Scripture), church property, human sexuality (marriage and celibacy), and the duty of the magistrate. Neither was the Confession silent on the contested matter of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. Here Bullinger softened the most objectionable (to Luther) features of Zwingli and almost came round to Geneva’s position.
The last of the sixteenth century’s comprehensive efforts to define the boundaries ot Reformed Protestantism was the Harmony of Confessions, published in 1581 in Geneva. The occasion was a gathering of Reformed leaders from Prance, Hungary, Poland, and the Netherlands, called in 1577 by John Casimir of the Palatinate and Wilhelm of Hesse. Initially, Girolamo Zanchi and Zacharias Ursinus drew the assignment to draft a confession that could unite Reformed churches in a way that the Lutheran Pormula of Concord had for Protestants in Germany. Instead of writing a new confession, Reformed pastors compiled an index of the various Protestant creeds that shared a similar doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. This catalogue of confessions included the Augsburg (1530), Tetrapolitan (1530), Basel (1534), Pirst (1536) and Second (1566) Helvetic, Saxony (1551), Wirtemberg (1552), Gallican (1559), and Belgic (1561) Confessions, the Thirty-Nine Articles (1562), and the Bohemian Confession (1573).
The editors of the Harmony of Confessions arranged the contents in a conventional order. Although not using a uniform table of contents, the selected creeds generally began with affirmations about Scripture and the Trinity, proceeded to Creation and the fall of man, devoted numerous chapters to Christ and the means of salvation, elaborated the nature of the church, its unity, officers, and ministry - particularly the sacraments - and finished with questions regarding civil government, marriage, and areas in which believers enjoyed liberty (adiaphra). The Harmony followed this pattern. The only real suspense was which confessions would make the final cut. Lor instance, in the chapter on predestination - a teaching that was initially controversial among Reformed Protestants but became one of the chief differences between the Reformed and Lutherans - the Harmony republished only five of the eleven creeds: the Pirst Helvetic, Gallican, Belgic, Scottish, and Basel. In contrast, in the chapter on the fall and human sinfulness, the Harmony included all of the creeds except for the Tetrapolitan Confession, which lacked the fuller exposition of later creeds.
The most surprising aspect of the Harmony was the inclusion of Lutheran teaching on the Lord’s Supper. In the fourteenth section, not far from the First Helvetic, a creed of decidedly Zwinglian sentiments, the editors printed the Augsburg Confession’s affirmation of the real presence. The way around this oddity, of course, was the handy editorial device of a footnote in which the editors explained that “the body of Christ is not really present in, with, or under the bread” other than in a “sacramental manner.” The reason for the note was that Christ’s body, “being circumscribed in its local situation,” had “truly ascended” to heaven. 3 The Harmony added further explanations that would have likely drawn dogmatic fire from inveterate Lutheran divines. Yet, as shallow as the Protestant unity may have appeared because the Lutheran presence in the Harmony was only on paper, this Reformed statement reflected a genuine attempt at the end of the sixteenth century to create a united Protestant front. The churches and pastors responsible for the Harmony were convinced that Protestant unity should extend ideally to Lutherans. This communion was not merely creedal. Reformed churches in Geneva and France followed policies for admitting Lutherans to the Lord’s Supper on the basis of both groups’ adherence to fundamental articles of the faith. Roman Catholics, in contrast, needed to repent publicly before being able to commune in a Reformed church.
Only the Reformed churches in France, the Netherlands, and Bremen adopted the Harmony. But the statement was indicative of the need for Reformed Protestants to explain themselves, both to other branches of the movement and to rulers who functioned as patrons of the churches. These sixteenth-century creeds were, in effect, precursors to the precise and elaborate statements that Reformed churches produced during the seventeenth century’s period of high orthodoxy. According to Richard A. Muller, orthodox or scholastic Reformed Protestantism stood in “double continuity” with both the Reformation and the scholastic methods of the medieval church. 4 The purpose was to synthesize the theology of the Reformed tradition and distinguish it polemically from both Roman Catholicism and other Protestants. Particularly notable in this regard were the efforts of the Dutch churches at the Synod of Dort (1618) and the English and Scottish divines who gathered in war-besieged London during the 1640s at Westminster. Ironically, however, the clearer the Reformed churches became in their teaching, the more prone those same churches were to defection from within and hostility from without. During the seventeenth century, Reformed pastors, like their predecessors when producing statements like the Tetrapolitan Confession or the Second Helvetic, needed to explain their views to headstrong and sometimes hostile rulers. This made the seventeenth century an era of consolidation and definition as Reformed polemicists distinguished Calvinism from both Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism. It was the
culmination of the original sixteenth-century reforms. At the same time, Calvinists also elaborated their convictions in the context of answering dissenters within their own ranks - therefore, the era of Reformed orthodoxy was not a golden age of church life but indicative of deep turmoil.
Victories, Defeats, and Ties
Reformed Protestants entered the early seventeenth century in remarkably good shape but would soon find that the task of consolidating and ordering church life was much more difficult than reform itself. Despite the variety of expressions in different locales, in 1600 Reformed churches across Europe possessed a welldeveloped and relatively stable ecclesiastical, doctrinal, and liturgical tradition. Between 1610 and 1680 these churches would be put severely to the test. The most immediate threat came from the same hand that had fed church reform: princes and kings. In fact, where Reformed churches were most dependent on their standing among the aristocracy of a country or region, the more vulnerable they were. Poland and Hungary illustrate the point. In the former, the decline of Reformed Protestantism occurred even before the seventeenth century. As early as the 1560s the work of the newly founded Jesuits was paying dividends when their schools became the favorites of Polish nobility - even Protestants. Jesuits also gained the ear of King Sigismund III, who increasingly favored Roman Catholic appointments during his lengthy tenure from 1587 to 1632. Roman Catholic influence found a favorable climate thanks to the Warsaw Confederation of 1573, which granted nobles the power to determine the religion within their territory. As such, Poland gradually turned back to Roman Catholicism through nobles who ended Protestant worship and priests who aggressively sought legal sanctions against infidels. By 1650 Poland had only 40 Reformed churches compared to 265 in 1570. Reformed Protestantism persisted a little longer in Lithuania. But the Second Northern War (1655-60), which witnessed invasions by Russia and Sweden, weakened the Reformed churches significantly. By 1700 conversions to Protestantism were illegal, and Protestant nobles could only worship in their personal churches.
In Hungary the trajectory of Reformed Protestants followed a similar course. In the territory controlled by the Habsburgs, rulers and Roman Catholic leaders conspired to roll back Protestant gains. Prior to the Thirty Years War (1618-48 ), Habsburg kings appointed officials and granted privileges explicitly on the basis of Roman Catholic identity. During the war, while Hungary took a back seat to Habsburg governance, Peter Pazmany, a former Reformed Protestant who switched churches under the influence of the Jesuits, introduced the Council of Trents own efforts to reform the church. Pazmany founded three Jesuit
seminaries and one Roman Catholic university in Hungary, while also writing a number of important controversial and devotional works that became influential in making Rome attractive again to Hungarian elites. After the Thirty Years War, Hungarian authorities imposed Roman Catholicism on churches that had been Protestant. During the reign of Leopold I (1658-1705), who attempted to reconstitute Hungarian law and restore religious unity, Protestant ministers started to be suspected of rebellion and disloyalty. The government rounded up as many as 750 ministers and freed only those who renounced Protestantism or converted to Rome. The others were imprisoned and sent to the galleys. When forty of those in galleys were forced to march to Naples in 1675 and a year later were liberated thanks to Dutch intervention, these Hungarian Protestants became a cause celeb re throughout Europe. Hungarian nobles, jealous to preserve their rights, reacted against Leopold’s repression of Protestantism and instigated a religious war that enlisted support from the French, who always looked for ways to check the Habsburgs. By 1681 the hostilities had ceased and Leopold agreed to revert to a 1670 agreement that had granted religious freedom to Protestants. But this did not stop his efforts to undermine Protestantism in Hungary. By 1700 Reformed Protestants comprised roughly a third of the population, down from between 40 percent and 45 percent at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
In France, Protestant dependence on the favors and faith of the aristocracy during the sixteenth century became a flimsy platform for stability in the next. The Edict of Nantes (1598) that had granted Huguenots limited but definite forms of toleration and protected freedom of conscience became increasingly contested after 1620. Louis XIII (1610-43) not only attempted to impose Roman Catholicism on Protestant outposts, such as Bearn, but also through political and economic perks wooed French nobles to return to Rome. Although the memory of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre made plausible their defensive strategies, the Huguenots did not ingratiate themselves to a system of tolerance when their militancy - both religious and political - could readily be construed as treasonous. Over time, aristocrats who had been Protestant reverted back to Rome. By the time of Louis XIV’s active reign in 1661 (until 1715), the kingdom’s attitude toward Protestants hardened into outright opposition. At first, the king established institutions to insure that Protestant churches complied with the finest points of the Edict of Nantes. Laws forbidding Reformed churches from receiving converts from Roman Catholicism followed. The most objectionable of these laws was a rule that removed children above the age of seven who desired to join a Roman Catholic church from their Protestant homes, and placed them with Roman Catholics families at the expense of their parents. Finally, in 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and established
an active campaign to force Protestant conversions. As many as 400,000 Protestants abjured their faith and fearfully affirmed Rome’s. Those who would not renounce their faith - about half as many - left France. Many settled in the Netherlands, England, Switzerland, and Brandenburg, and smaller numbers migrated to the British colonies in North America.
Defeat, however, was not the only outcome that Reformed Protestants experienced during the seventeenth century. In Transylvania, for instance, rulers who supported Reformed churches remained in power throughout most of the century. At first, Transylvania might have appeared to be following the pattern of Roman Catholic recovery on the heels of Protestant gains. But when Gabor Bethlen secured the crown from Sigismund Bathory in 1601, Transylvania became a hospitable even if somewhat isolated outpost for Calvinists. Bethlen and his successors established schools that inculcated Reformed teaching, sent aspiring scholars to universities in the empire and the Netherlands for training to teach in the kingdom’s schools, and sided with Reformed ministers in conflicts with both anti-Trinitarians and Roman Catholics.
Even more impressive were the results of Reformed activity in the Netherlands where the contours of Reformed orthodoxy received their first significant postReformation codification. Against the backdrop of a theological conflict over election and human depravity, seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed Protestantism gave to Calvinism its memorable mnemonic TULIP (i.e., Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, Perseverance of the saints), also known as Calvinism’s five points. 5 Alongside the Dutch contribution to Reformed theology was a British-inspired rejuvenation of practical piety, called the Nadere Reformatie (i.e. further reformation), that infused among the churches a sense of purpose and commitment to godliness like that which had characterized Puritanism at turn of the seventeenth century. Willem Teellinck (1579-1629), the leader of this movement, had studied law in England, admired the zeal he witnessed in Puritan churches, and sought to model the Dutch churches after the Puritans, especially in the matter of Sabbath observance, by prohibiting recreation and business on Sundays.
Teellinck’s teaching received sporadic and informal support in different Dutch settings during the seventeenth century but the chief development among the Dutch Reformed churches was the theology of Arminianism. This was the designation for controversial teaching that grew out of the thought and career of Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), a Reformed pastor in Amsterdam and later a theology professor at the University of Leiden, who had learned Reformed theology both in the Netherlands at Leiden and in Geneva through studies with Theodore Beza. Arminius’ time in Geneva was significant for developments in the Dutch church because he studied during a period when Beza’s teaching on
predestination began to receive critical scrutiny. Calvin’s own view on God’s sovereign determination to save the elect was not without its critics. But as difficult as Calvin’s doctrine was, he treated it in the context of the divine power necessary for salvation and so argued that predestination should be as much a source of comfort as a subject that required delicacy. In contrast, his successor in Geneva, Beza, developed the notion that God had predestined those whom he would save and those whom he would condemn before the beginning of time. For Beza, predestination had more to do with the plan of salvation (i.e. soteriology) than with the nature and power of God. Beza’s teaching also elicited criticisms, and during the 1580s church leaders in Germany, England, and Switzerland called for conferences to address predestination. In 1588 the city of Bern hosted one of those debates.
Discussions of predestination during the late sixteenth century were inconclusive but generated the sort of doubts that Arminius himself would express. His questions went beyond predestination to the atonement, and whether or not Christ underwent a sacrificial death only for the elect, chosen before time, or for the entire human race who were then responsible either to trust Christ or reject his saving work. Another consideration was whether a believer could lose salvation through infidelity, or would saints persevere in faith thanks to divine sovereignty? Arminius began to speculate and publish on these subjects, and in 1603 when the faculty at Leiden appointed him as professor of theology his views took on added significance. Franciscus Gomarus, one of Arminius’ colleagues at Leiden, scrutinized the new professor’s views and engaged him in public debates. Quickly these disagreements spread to other quarters of the Dutch churches and many ministers started to call for a national synod.
The Arminian controversy not only trickled down from the university’s ivory tower to the church’s rank and file but also rekindled older disputes between ministers and magistrates over the ultimate final authority in ecclesiastical affairs. Thanks to his own convictions and personal connections - Arminius was married to the daughter of a family prominent in Amsterdam politics - he took the position, associated with Erastianism, that the state was the final arbiter of church matters. One of Arminius’ greatest defenders, Johannes Uytenbogaert, the pastor to the stadtholder, Prince Maurice, wrote On the Office and Authority of a Higher Christian Government in Church Affairs (1610) to resolve the political dispute that accompanied Arminius’ contested theology. On the other side, Arminius’ pastoral opponents argued for autonomy from the state; they insisted that church classes and synods were not only competent but responsible to oversee and correct the witness and work of the Dutch church. Related to questions surrounding the relative powers of church and state was the status of the creed or the church’s official doctrine. Arminius claimed that his views were
compatible with the Heidelberg Catechism and the Belgic Confession but also believed that if a national synod were convened these doctrinal statements should be reconsidered to see if revision were necessary. Without surprise, opponents of Arminius took the opposite view, insisting that these creeds had not only given theological coherence to the Dutch churches for four decades but had summarized the faith of Protestants who had sacrificed their lives.
Arminius died in 1609 but the dispute over his views lived on, as his supporters, known as the Remonstrants, leaned heavily on civil authorities, while the Counter-Remonstrants held a majority of pastors. A year after Arminius’ death, the Remonstrants, now led by Uytenbogaert, issued a petition that identified their chief religious convictions: that those who believed in Christ and persisted in their faith were the elect; that Christ had died for the entire human race; and that people had the power to resist divine grace. The statement also declared the state’s authority over the church, and called for a revision of the Belgic Confession. In 1611, the Counter-Remonstrants, led by Arminius’ rival at Leiden, Gomarus, responded with a declaration of their own about the particular nature of Christ’s death - that it was only for the elect - and the impossibility ofbelievers losing their salvation. The state, ledbyjohan van Oldenbarnevelt, an influential regent of Holland, contributed to the growing animosity and unintentionally hurt the Remonstrants’ cause by imposing a system of tolerance for all views within the church. The intention was to calm the hostilities, but the proposal included controversial sermons or classical or synodical actions against erroneous views. When Counter-Remonstrant pastors persisted in exposing the dangers of Arminianism, the state in some cases intervened and removed the contentious ministers from their pulpits. Meanwhile, Lutherans, Anabaptists, and Roman Catholics, under religious tolerance afforded by the Dutch government, were conducting services without opposition. In effect, by seeking the aid of the state, the Remonstants appeared to be guilty of inconsistently using political repression to enforce tolerance for their views. Ironically, this move turned the foes of tolerance, the Counter-Remonstrants, into victims of political oppression.
The situation almost completely reversed itself once Maurice of Nassau, the leader of the House of Orange, decided to support the Counter-Remonstrants. In the summer of 1617 he began to worship in The Hague with CounterRemonstrants, led by a minister whom city officials had dismissed. Oldenbarnevelt regarded this as an act of defiance against the existing religious order and at his direction the States of Holland empowered all local governments to hire mercenary soldiers to counter such disobedience. This action only emboldened Maurice, who had legitimate control over all soldiers, to establish his authority, disband the mercenaries, and dismiss all local officials who were
sympathetic to Oldenbarnevelt. Maurice also had Oldenbarnevelt arrested and condemned to death for disrupting Dutch society and undermining the true faith.
The intervention of Maurice was the political backdrop to the Synod of Dort, which met in November 1618 to address the doctrines originally taught by Arminius and then advanced by the Remonstrants. The assembled pastors and university professors included representatives from British, German, and Swiss churches. (Invitations went out to all the Reformed Churches in Europe.) These delegates met for over six months, first examining individual Remonstrants who were more interested in synodical procedures than in explaining their views. Under the tight control of Counter-Remonstrants, the Synod then turned to the printed works of Remonstrants and predictably found Arminianism wanting. At the same time, the Synod avoided the dogmatic speculation that sometimes afflicted discussions of divine sovereignty and predestination, and instead adopted a series of positions designed to combine doctrinal clarity and pastoral guidance. The Five Points of Calvinism that Dort formulated stressed divine sovereignty but in ways designed to console believers rather than to answer philosophical speculation. For these commissioners, human beings were incapable of doing anything that could merit God’s favor, but such sinfulness could not withstand the gracious intervention of God to initiate faith in Christ and a life of good works. This Christian life depended on Christ’s merits, particularly his sacrificial death to pay the penalty of sin for those whom God had elected to save. This grace, in turn, because it did not depend on the believer’s goodness, could not be lost and believers, once saved, would continue in a life of faithfulness no matter how imperfect.
The Synod’s decision received approval from the States-General, which in turn sent the articles to all of the provincial church bodies for their ministers’ signature. As many as two hundred Remonstrants refused to sign. The penalty for defiance was removal from office and loss of income. Forty of the recalcitrant eventually reconciled their views with the Synod’s teaching; seventy remained within the country and lived as private citizens. The most vociferous Remonstrants went into exile. Some of these regrouped in Antwerp and established a Remonstrant Brotherhood, complete with their own creed, which was unsurprisingly critical of predestination and the imposition of creeds on ministers and church members. Under Dutch laws the assembly was illegal.
The decrees of Dort also drew affirmation from other Reformed churches. In France, the 1623 National Synod required the churches to accept the Dutch declaration; ministers who did not lost their offices. As late as 1647 Geneva’s Company of Pastors still required subscription to Dort from all its members. The churches in Scotland and German-speaking Switzerland, though
not requiring formal affirmation, greeted the 1618 Synod’s findings with approval.
The Synod of Dort did not end questions surrounding predestination, however. The most famous instance of lingering disputes took place among the French, thanks to the teaching of Moyse Amyraut (1596-1664), professor of theology at the Reformed Academy of Saumur. His book, Brief Treatise on Predestination (1634) outlined another approach to the difficult implications surrounding divine election, namely, hypothetical universalism. Amyraut hoped to avoid the errors of Arminius by arguing that Christ’s sacrificial death was effective for all people as long as they trusted in him. He also opposed the Arminian notion that believers, by summoning up the necessary belief, played an active role in their salvation. This modified understanding of election attempted to soften the apparently arbitrary treatments of divine sovereignty by stressing the possibility of grace for all people.
Amyraut’s peers, however, did not regard his revisions as an improvement. Pierre Du Moulin, the most gifted Huguenot theologian of the seventeenth century, judged that Amyraut was guilty of at least two-thirds of Arminius’ errors. In 1637 Amyraut successfully defended his views before the national synod that met in Alen^on. Although he escaped formal censure, the synod’s deliberations registered significant doubts about the Saumur professor’s soundness. Within a decade his teaching became the object of another dispute that involved the faculty at Leiden; to his opponents Amyraut appeared to be heading in the same direction that had landed Arminius outside the bounds of Reformed orthodoxy (even though his views were remarkably similar to Richard Baxter see Chapter Nine, below - who escaped condemnation). The ongoing controversy prompted churches in Switzerland and France either to bar students from studying at Saumur or to prohibit the school’s graduates from ordination. Finally, in 1649 France’s Reformed churches arrived at a compromise that put an end to the controversy and left Amyraut in his position at Saumur. But outside the northern parts of France, where Amyraut’s teaching had its greatest support, his views continued to be suspect and his influence meager.
United Kingdom, Divided Church
The experience of Reformed churches was arguably more explosive in the British Isles than anywhere else in Europe. Thanks to the British Empire’s expansion overseas during the seventeenth century, those explosions would have ramifications for the future of Calvinism in the New World. In England frustrations over the failure to reform the Church of England thoroughly - especially in matters of church government and worship - led Reformed ministers to
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cultivate informal and personal methods of godliness outside the institutional church. In Scotland, the ink was barely dry on the harmonization of episcopal and presbyterian polities within the Kirk when the king responsible for the agreement, James VI, succeeded Elizabeth as James I of England and replaced the House of Tudor with that of Stuart. A common monarch for Scotland and England meant that the existing tensions in those respective nations now had the potential to multiply. Adding to this recipe for turmoil was a monarch who believed in the divine right of kings and needed to resist an understandable temptation to impose order on his ministers for the good of his kingdom.
Even before the religiously inspired tensions that developed during the Stuart dynasty, English churchmen had grown frustrated with political roadblocks to reform and proposed an alternative. Unable to convince Elizabeth and her advisors of either the biblical warrant or practical benefits of presbyterian government in the English church, an important strand of Puritanism began to look away from the church’s formal structures to the inner and personal aspects of believers’ lives and experience. These writers became known as the Puritan “physicians of the soul” and traced their intellectual and institutional lineage to Cambridge University, where the likes of Richard Greenham, Richard Rogers, Arthur Dent, and William Ames pursued a vein of introspective piety that William Perkins had opened a generation earlier when he searched for evidence of predestination in the interior life of Christians. Lewis Bayly, an Oxford churchman, was also an important contributor to Puritanism’s practical divinity. This school of Reformed Protestantism sublimated Puritanism’s zeal for a thoroughly reformed church into a project for personal reformation by supplying methods - from prayer and Bible reading to Sabbath observance and strenuously moral behavior - for individual godliness. What Reformed Protestants achieved elsewhere through pastors and elders overseeing the lives of parish members, advocates of practical divinity accomplished through believers attending to their own experience and practice . 6
An important theme in the literature of English practical divinity was the call for Christians to make their election sure by charting the progress of holiness in of daily affairs. As popular as this strain of piety became - both in England and in parts of the Netherlands - it also placed significant strain upon the adherents of Reformed Protestantism. On the one hand, critics objected that practical divinity turned free grace into moralism by suggesting that saints could prove their salvation through moral effort. On the other hand, it also encouraged some - later Baptists and Congregationalists - to dispense with the older pattern of devotion that presumed infant baptism and a process of gradual identification (on the part of young people) with the teachings and practices of the church.
Another unintended consequence of Puritan zeal for personal holiness was a high-church, sacramental Anglican reaction under James I that was explicitly opposed to the precision of Reformed practical divinity. Puritans who were zealous for experiential devotion did not get off to a good start with James I when they confronted him, soon after his inauguration, with the Millenary Petition, a proposal for modifications in worship, doctrinal fidelity, and church government along the lines of other Reformed churches. In opposition to this petition a party within the Church of England emerged that championed sacraments and rites and adopted the name, Arminian, at least out of objections to Reformed teaching on predestination. These English churchmen, sometimes called Formalists or Laudians (named for Archbishop William Laud), viewed Reformed Protestants suspiciously as sectarians who were alienating people from the church with an overly strict piety and a hopelessly high standard for institutional purity.
If James I did not identify with the Formalists’ understanding of the church, like them he was suspicious of zealously scrupulous presbyterian types after his experiences with the Kirk in his homeland. As a result, James opposed any effort to overturn episcopacy or yield the crown’s supremacy over the church. He also resisted Puritan attempts to implement strict Sabbatarian observance by overseeing the publication of the Book of Sports, a guide that determined the approved forms of Sunday recreation outside the hours of worship and included archery and dancing. James also hurt his standing with Puritans and strict Presbyterians with the Five Articles of Perth (1618). This statement was designed to bring the Scottish church into closer uniformity with England by prescribing kneeling at worship, confirmation by bishops, the church calendar and holy days, and by permitting private communion. Even so, James was not opposed to Reformed zeal in the way the Formalists were. He affirmed predestination, supported the Synod of Dort by sending English and Scottish delegates, and silenced English critics of the Synod’s canons. Overall, James steered a moderate course between the extremes of personal religion and sacramentalism, and the politics of two national churches.
Once his son, Charles I, ascended the throne in 1625, however, the balance of ecclesiastical power shifted decidedly toward the Formalists. William Laud was not only an important advisor to the new king but in 1633 became Archbishop. In turn, Laud became the king’s enforcer of ecclesiastical uniformity. The Caroline Divines, all high-church Formalists, claimed, contrary to the Puritans and Presbyterians, that they were recovering the original themes of English Protestantism and preserving the church from sectarians and schismatics. The most committed Reformed Protestants who looked to Geneva and Zurich for inspiration and who maintained close ties to the Dutch churches took
an opposite view. For the Puritans, Charles and his Archbishop were steering the English church back toward Rome. Those who worried most about the fate of the church and the threat of impending divine judgment left England. Some settled in the Netherlands, others left for the New World to begin the experiment of transplanting Puritanism to New England.'
For Scotland, Charles was no less provocative in his ecclesiastical policies. Not only did the king enforce the Five Articles of Perth, but he essentially ignored the compromise between episcopacy and presbyterianism that his father had crafted; Charles decided to increase the civil responsibilities of Scottish bishops without seeking input from the General Assembly. Charles’ major offense was to call for a new prayer book in 1636 for the Scottish church. It not only contained many features that Presbyterians rejected as Roman Catholic, but the six-month interval between the king’s decision and the service book’s introduction gave critics ample time to let fears worsen and prepare a response. On July 23, 1637, when the dean of Edinburgh’s St Giles cathedral finally used the book in services, the people revolted by shouting and throwing stools in an outburst that some believed to have been well orchestrated. Scottish officials responded to continued demonstrations against the prayer book by forbidding all gatherings for protest as treasonous. The Scottish faithful retaliated by entering into a national covenant to preserve the true religion. Covenanting was a practice with deep roots in Scotland and the 1637 instance called upon the king and parliament to remember and uphold the National Covenant of 1581, administered at the time of James Vi’s accommodation of zealous Presbyterians, in which the nation determined to use its political institutions to abolish Roman Catholicism. The reiteration of the covenant in 1637 to challenge James’ son, Charles, drew widespread support in the Lowlands from the people, clergy, and nobles.
To counter the Scottish uprising, the king was prepared to use force but called for a general assembly before rousing the militia. Charles hoped to diffuse the situation through the Scottish religious institution by stacking the deck of participants and agenda, and thereby overturn the Presbyterian challenge. But the opposition to his religious policies was so fierce that opponents themselves were able to influence the selection of delegates and topics for debate. When the assembly met in Glasgow in 1638 it defied the king and proceeded to condemn the Five Articles of Perth and the prayer book, and to abolish episcopacy. Charles tried to bring the Scots into compliance through force, but in two successive wars the Scottish military proved superior to English units that were underfunded and lacked motivation. The king’s failed requests to the English parliament for funding only heightened tensions in England. Meanwhile, the Scottish Kirk witnessed the triumph of a party committed to true Presbyterianism,
the national covenant, and ending episcopacy in Scotland. Approximately onetenth of the Kirk’s ministers, not sharing these convictions, lost their posts during the 1640s.
The antagonism between Charles and the English parliament not only erupted in 1642 in civil war but also wound up involving the Scots. In the background ol this conflict was the religious question and Charles’ poor handling of the English and Scottish churches. Parliament was by no means unified on church matters and members ranged between a small group still inclined to a modified episcopacy, and others who favored presbyterianism, Congregationalism, or even independency. Where the English officials agreed was in the opposition to Laud. In 1640 parliament impeached and imprisoned the archbishop along with several of his colleagues. Five years later Laud would be executed for treason. Also obvious to parliament was Charles’ failure to uphold the liberties of Englishmen and the prerogatives of parliament.
Since parliament agreed in the main that Charles’ religious policies were untenable, members called in 1642 for an assembly of ministers and theologians to meet at Westminster and devise a new church order. Because the war against the king was going badly, parliament solicited support from the Scots, who agreed on condition that the English also enter into a national covenant. In 1643 the Scots and English ratified the Solemn League and Covenant which committed England to the same principles of the true religion (read “Presbyterianism”) to which the Scots had subscribed. In turn, this covenant recast the agenda for the Westminster Assembly. In addition to recommending a new church order, the British Divines would draft a new confession of faith, a directory for worship, and catechetical aids, all designed to ensure uniformity of faith and practice in England.
The majority of delegates to the assembly, which along with Dort constituted the high point of seventeenth-century Reformed orthodoxy, adhered to a presbyterian form of church government, but English politics prevented them from prevailing. The assembly’s greatest concession was specifically on the matter of church government. Thanks to the success of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army against the king’s forces, the proponents of independency and Erastian views about the state were more successful in promoting their ideas at the assembly. The result was a church polity that favored presbyterianism while carving out room for independence and conceding church matters to the state. The assembly’s work on liturgy again reflected a compromise that owed greatly to the alliance of the Scots and Cromwell in the war against Charles. The Directory for Public Worship struck a balance between the Scottish desire for a set order of worship and the independents’ opposition to fixed prayers; the directory only supplied detailed outlines for public prayer. The Directory, along
with the Confession of Faith, also incorporated themes from English practical divinity with continental Reformed teaching. The Westminster Divines favored many of the devotional practices that had developed among Puritans for half a century, such as Sabbatarianism, the elimination of holy days and festivals, and prescriptions for family worship. The influence of English practical divinity was also evident in the Confession of Faith, where the assembly explored in greater detail the order of salvation and the personal appropriation of grace. At the same time, the assembly followed Dort on the atonement, the sovereignty of the spirit in regeneration, and the impossibility of the elect falling from grace. But the Divines did avoid taking sides in the debates over predestination. One area where the assembly showed no innovation was in the production of a metrical psalter for public worship. Francis Rous, a member of parliament, proposed his own metrical psalter but the Scottish commissioners preferred the version by William Muir. Parliament had the last word when the Lords authorized the Rous edition for the English churches.
Although the Westminster Assembly relied on compromises to carry out its agenda, the reception of the Divines’ work would reveal even wider gaps between Reformed ideals and British realities. During the Civil War the English churches resisted many of the prescriptions of Westminster, especially rules for a presbyterian church government. After the execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649 and the institution of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, religious bedlam prevailed, with parliament switching from laws that required weekly attendance at the established church’s services to regulations that merely required attendance at some gathering of religious observance. Tolerance of all views was not an option, thanks to a Committee of Triers charged with overseeing the ordination of Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians; England would not turn a blind eye to Ranters or Quakers. But expectations for a uniform religious order were gone, ironically under the devout Puritan Cromwell. Paths to the ministry were now available through Anglican or presbyterian routes, or through the official Committee of Triers. In congregations, the orders of services varied widely. The shift in England from an ecclesiastical establishment (under Laud) that imposed uniformity (1640s), followed by a parliament-sponsored and Puritan-informed debate over the best church order (1640s), to religious chaos (1650s) was arguably the most dramatic change in seventeenth-century European church life.
The consequences of the English Civil War were almost as convulsive for the Scots as the English. True to their covenant with the king and wary of England’s inability to embrace presbyterianism, the Scots in 1646 had entered into negotiations with Charles in which they considered supporting him if he would agree to uphold the Solemn League and Covenant. Although Charles never signed the
Covenant, his response led the Scots to be encouraged. In turn, the nobility, who dominated parliament, came to the king’s defense. Cromwell’s eventual defeat of Scottish forces created a political vacuum in Edinburgh that ministers zealous for the Covenant (and opposed to defending Charles because of his failure to sign it) filled. After Charles’ execution, these Covenanters negotiated with his brother, again seeking the king’s endorsement of the Covenant in return for military support from the Scots. This alliance, however, proved disastrous for the Covenanters, whom Cromwell subjected to a humiliating defeat at Dunbar in 1650. In the aftermath of this battle, the Scots continued to be divided: the majority regarded the next Stuart monarch as the best means toward a presbyterian order in Scotland, while a minority, led by Samuel Rutherford, believed that defeat was a sign of God’s judgment. The split mattered little after 1652, since Cromwell ended Scotland’s independence and allowed the religious disorder of England to seep northward.
The end of the interregnum and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660 returned ecclesiastical order to both England and Scotland. In England the monarchy initially insisted on the Book of Common Prayer and episcopacy, and renounced the Solemn League and Covenant. The Clarendon Code that established these policies only lessened in its severity after a decade, when in 1672 Charles II issued a Declaration of Indulgence to allow public worship for Protestant dissenters (Nonconformists), such as Presbyterians, Independents, Congregationalists, and Baptists. In Scotland the Restoration prompted parliament to recognize episcopacy as a better means to control the church than presbyterianism. Scotland followed England also in repudiating the Solemn League and Covenant. Those Presbyterian ministers who had been most committed to the Covenant lost their posts after refusing to submit to the oversight of bishops. These Covenanters in turn mounted various forms of protest, using gatherings in the fields as conventicles for worship and inspiration. Between the 1660s and the 1680s these uprisings met with armed suppression and the execution of offenders.
The Glorious Revolution that ushered to the throne William and Mary in 1688 finally put an end to almost a century of religious upheaval, but only then did British Reformed Protestants enjoy the blessings of monarchical supremacy. In England the adherents of Reformed theology, scattered among the Protestant dissenters, received legal protection to conduct their own services, while the Church of England lost touch with the currents that had connected the English and Scots to the Reformed churches on the Continent. In Scotland, the support for William came generally from those sympathetic to presbyterianism, which in turn led to the restoration of a presbyterian Kirk. But this was not satisfying to Scottish episcopalians, who eventually formed their own synods and parishes,
independent of the national church. These episcopal bodies did not become legal until 1712. Meanwhile, those presbyterians most committed to the old covenants - known as Covenanters or Cameronians - refused the privileges and auspices of the Kirk, choosing to remain separate and continuing the tradition of gathering in conventicles. The cause of Reformed orthodoxy was hardly responsible for seventeenth-century British convulsions, but it hardly soothed them either.
Doctrinal Retrenchment and Intellectual Experimentation
Back on the Continent, Reformed church leaders faced divisions that were by no means as grave as those in England and Scotland but still revealed the difficulty of maintaining the logic and motivation that had launched their churches. In 1674 the pastors of Switzerland’s Protestant cantons, led by Basel and Zurich, met to respond to several of the theological disputes and challenges that had plagued the Reformed churches since the rise of Arminianism. They produced a statement, the so-called Helvetic Consensus, deemed “the highest statement of high Reformed orthodoxy ever adopted by a major ecclesiastical gathering.” 8 Among the participants was Francois Turretini (1623-87), a pastor and theologian from Geneva who solidified the city’s reputation for sound theology and whose works would later be translated and circulated widely in various Reformed churches. The Consensus took aim specifically at new scholarly approaches to Scripture and lingering doubts about predestination, election, and the extent of the atonement. On the former topic, the Swiss Divines affirmed the reliability of the extant Hebrew manuscripts down to the text’s vowel points and blamed scholars who highlighted discrepancies among the various manuscripts as bringing the foundation of faith “into perilous danger.” On predestination and the atonement, which accounted for twenty-two of the Consensus’ twenty-six canons, the pastors reaffirmed the positions that the Dutch had elaborated in 1618 at Dort; the Swiss condemned both Arminian and Amyrauldian teachings that were obviously continuing to find outlets. In that spirit, Canon IV declared: “[God] elected a certain and definite number to be led, in time, unto salvation in Christ, their Guarantor and sole Mediator. And on account of his merit, by the mighty power of the regenerating Holy Spirit, he decreed these elect to be effectually called, regenerated and gifted with faith and repentance.”
That the Swiss pastors needed to respond to errors almost seven decades old was an indication of the failure of other attempts to settle the debates of the seventeenth century. In point of fact, the questions that Arminius raised at the beginning of the century established a pattern of critical inquiry that would create a countervailing undertow beneath the waves of orthodox Reformed
doctrinal formulations at Dort and Westminster. In addition to the debates swirling around the eternal decrees of God, Reformed theologians faced intellectual challenges as abstract as the first principles of philosophy and as particular as the study of Hebrew vowel points. Rene Descartes’ philosophical and scientific arguments, which featured knowledge of God and the self based on doubt and a mechanistic conception of the natural world, were one source of worry for Reformed academics. Because Descartes lived in the Netherlands for the better part of two decades (1628-49), his views gained a hearing and drew vigorous opposition from the great defender of Reformed orthodoxy, Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676), who taught at the University of Utrecht. In France, the scholarship of Louis Cappel (1585-1658), who taught Hebrew at the Academy of Saumur, questioned the reliability of the most widely used manuscripts for the Old Testament. His doubts about textual variations did not go as far as whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch. But Cappel did introduce an interpretive method that highlighted differences between ancient Israel and contemporary Europe, such that anyone hoping to base modern statecraft on King David’s policies would be guilty of anachronistic argumentation. Adding to Cappel’s biblical scholarship was the work of Johannes Cocceius (1603-69), a theologian and Hebrew scholar from Bremen who had studied at German universities before taking a post at the University of Leiden. His covenant theology, which stressed the difference between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, and between Israel and the church, was yet another challenge to received methods and conclusions of biblical interpretation. Like Descartes, Cocceius drew fire from Voetius and prolonged disputes among the Dutch Reformed churches. Unlike the Arminian controversy, this one never split the Dutch church. But Cocceius contributed to a trend in seventeenth-century academic circles that undermined literalistic readings of Scripture, especially those attempts to find in the pages of the Israelites’ laws and prophets the norms for the Christian church.
In many cases, Reformed scholars and the churches that looked to them for the training of ministers absorbed these challenges without great hardship. But in some instances, the path of accommodation also involved significant drift away from the precise formulations of Reformed orthodoxy. This shift was nowhere more evident than in Geneva and the generational succession between Francois Turretini and his son, Jean-Alphonse (1671-1737). The elder Turretini died when his son was sixteen, thus freeing Jean-Alphonse to mature intellectually in ways that ran afoul of his father’s orthodox convictions. His studies took him to several European universities where he became familiar with the new philosophy and methods advanced by Descartes and Isaac Newton. The tension between the new learning and Reformed orthodoxy, however, did not prevent
Jean-Alphonse from securing his father’s post at the Geneva Academy. He began in 1701 as rector and within four years was lecturing where his father and Calvin had before him. An important theme in Jean-Alphonse’s teaching was the elevation of reason as an independent source of knowledge about God and his ways. His 1735 work, Treatise of the Christian Religion, developed this point by attempting to prove, contrary to deism, that Reformed orthodoxy was fully reasonable. Jean-Alphonse’s teaching was one consequence of the dilemmas faced by a century of theological debate; knowing how to handle the mysteries of predestination and election would make or break the proponents of Reformed Protestantism. Even those Geneva pastors who were closer to the senior Turretini than to Jean-Alphonse, such as Benedict Pictet, the author of the popular Christian Theology (1696), avoided dogmatism about predestination and preferred to promote practical guidance for believers instead of precise doctrine.
By the end of the seventeenth century, changes in Geneva church life were emblematic of disputes among the Reformed churches and political antagonisms within Protestant kingdoms. In 1690 the old psalter, a staple of Reformed worship among French speakers, made way for a modernized version which incorporated contemporary linguistic styles. Soon thereafter the Geneva pastors approved the introduction of services on Christmas afternoons, which led to the observance of other holy days from Rome’s hturgical calendar. In 1707 the Company of Pastors approved a Lutheran minister to conduct worship services for the city’s German-speaking residents. Within a few years they admitted the Lutheran pastor to their membership. Of course, the pastors in Geneva had historically sought unity with Lutherans, but not at the expense of indifference to those teachings and practices that had divided the two wings of Protestantism.
A Century’s Worth of Conflict
In most histories of seventeenth-century Europe, religion occupies center stage, at least during the period from 1618 to 1648 when the Thirty Years War demonstrated the discrepancy among the ideals of Christendom, the reality of three rival Christian churches (Roman, Lutheran, and Reformed), and the power cravings of rulers. In point of fact, the Reformed churches largely escaped the ravages of those religious wars. But even without experiencing the continental European conflicts directly, Reformed Protestants confronted turmoil and division that was almost as traumatic.
The one Reformed stronghold to experience the brunt of the Thirty Years War was the Palatinate, where the ruler, Frederick V, allowed his awkward succession to the throne of Bohemia to distract from turmoil in his hereditary lands. Not only were his efforts to protect Protestant interests against the new
emperor, the Roman Catholic Ferdinand II (1610-37), a colossal failure of statecraft and diplomacy, but they left the Upper Palatinate vulnerable to attacks initially from Spain and then decisively from Maximilian of Bavaria. By 1628, Protestantism in the Palatinate (which included Reformed Protestants and a large population of Lutherans, especially among the nobility) was illegal and Roman Catholicism was the official religion. Pastors lost their charges and Reformed adherents received a mandate either to convert or leave the territory. In 1631, a year after King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden became the hero of Protestants by intervening successfully against Maximilian, Lutheranism, thanks to the Swedish monarch, became the Palatinate’s official faith. Roman Catholics would gain the upper hand within the territory once more during the Thirty Years War, but they only managed a policy of toleration. Part of the reality behind this concession was that by the late 1630s the war had lost its explicitly religious character and had descended into political rivalry. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) restored the Palatinate to its pre-war status and thus returned the churches to their Reformed identity. But in 1685 when the electorate passed to the Roman Catholic side of the ruling family, the Palatinate experienced a competitive equilibrium among Reformed Protestants, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics. Reformed adherents were in the majority numerically, but often were forced to share buildings with Roman Catholics and hold separate services at specified times.
Even without war of the kind experienced in the Palatinate, during the seventeenth century the Reformed churches endured a series of conflicts, both internal and external, that proved how difficult the task of carrying out reform would be. In Hungary, Poland-Lithuania, and France, Reformed Protestants suffered enormous defeats. In Diarmaid MacCulloch’s fitting description, by 1700 the frontier of Protestantism in Europe “had retreated hundreds of miles north,” “from the borders of Italy to the Germanic middle territories of the Holy Roman Empire.” 9 He adds that these changes in geographical distribution left Geneva in the south as “a lonely outpost.” This left northern Europe as the political and intellectual center of Reformed Protestantism, with the Netherlands, the British Isles, and the Protestant parts of Switzerland as the strongest churches. But even in the areas of Reformed vitality, the seventeenth century had not been kind on churches, where important moments of theological definition took place alongside significant innovations. As Muller writes, Reformed orthodoxy after 1725 was “less secure in its philosophical foundations,” “less certain of its grasp of the biblical standard, and often (though hardly always) less willing to draw out its polemic against other ’orthodox’ forms of Christianity.” In a word, while the seventeenth century saw the confessionalization of Europe, the eighteenth century reversed the trend with its own version of “deconfessionalization.” 10
The irony of the seventeenth century is that it was both the period when Reformed Protestants gained sufficient clarity to establish orthodox boundaries and when their churches showed the first strains of liberal theological trends. Perhaps just as ironic is that the achievements of national churches in bodies such as the Synod of Dort and the Westminster Assembly took place at the same time that a significant element within Reformed Protestantism was turning inward, away from the formal mechanisms of the institutional church to the personal and intense pursuit of personal holiness. The Reformed churches had emerged in the 1520s with great vigor and resiliency, thanks in part to able leadership and the support of sympathetic magistrates. Then during the middle decades of the sixteenth century the reforms begun in Zurich and Geneva took root, notably among the Scots, Dutch, and, to a lesser extent, Germans. Although part of the political establishment, Reformed churches still faced internal dissent and intellectual dilemmas that made necessary the defining synods of Dort and Westminster. Even with the aid of these confessional affirmations, the Reformed churches generally lacked the mechanisms, political and ecclesiastical, to enforce orthodoxy. That deficiency helps to account for the seventeenth-century decline of Calvinism among the Swiss.
By 1700 the future of Reformed churches in Europe did not look propitious. If Reformed Protestantism were going to experience revitalization, it needed new settings and vehicles even as it depended on the genius and energy of the Scots, Dutch, Germans, and their New World settlements.
CHAPTER FIVE