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The chapter shows to what extent Schleiermacher's essay on election agrees with Augustine and Calvin that the ground of election and reprobation is not found in human beings but in God. Those who are captured by the power of God's Word are the elect, those who are not captured by it are the reprobate. Reprobation does not entail damnation; nobody ever loses the possibility of being spiritually revived. The exclusion from the community of believers is not the result of a divine foreordination but an expression of the historical development of God's kingdom. Schleiermacher rejects not only the idea of a positive divine decree of reprobation, as Lutheran theologians did in their quarrel with the Reformed side, but he refutes altogether the idea of particular decrees for individuals or for two different groups of persons. Election and reprobation are rooted in a single divine decree.

Calvin's theology of the resurrection of the body represents a conceptual hinge between traditional doctrines of the resurrection and modern denigration of the body. Calvin's experience with the dying body poignantly draws attention to death and brokenness as the enemies to be overcome in the resurrection. Yet Calvin also exposes possible pitfalls for a constructive theology of the body — the dangers of allowing a normative dualism to determine theological anthropology and of failing to recognize that the body of death does not tell the full story of the body.

This chapter discusses the early modern origins of freedom of religion in the Protestant Reformation (including the contributions of Martin Luther and John Calvin), the genesis of the “American constitutional experiment in religious liberty” (noting, especially, the influence of Roger Williams, John Locke, and James Madison), and the formulation of religious freedom in and subsequent jurisprudence of the First Amendment (e.g., the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses).

Mark Twain grappled seriously with theologians from the Calvinist tradition. While many of his comments seem dismissive (and funny), it is clear that Calvinism charged his writing with what one might call an insistent humorousness of purpose. Reflecting on free will, election, and predestination, Twain read especially Jonathan Edwards; not just as one of whom to make fun but as one with whom he had much in common. Edwards provided more than just a whipping boy for Twain’s philosophical comedy—they shared a theological vocabulary, metaphysical assumptions, and a view of God as sovereign. Their disagreements were substantial, but Mark Twain and the Calvinists were partners in the same enterprise. Thus, one can argue that Twain’s growth as a writer came, not, as some have argued, only insofar as he could distance himself from his Calvinist upbringing and influences, but rather as he fully engaged and wrestled with that tradition.

Among the signal achievements of the mainline reformers John Calvin and Martin Luther was to reinvigorate the semantics of paradox, especially as relates to the concepts of freedom and election. Paradox was hardly unknown in Christian thought (or other religious thought) but the reformers soaked their thought in paradox. The American novelist and essayist John Updike, through the media of Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and others, is a Protestant thinker in this sense, a thinker of paradox in a country (at best) unacquainted with it, perhaps especially in its reigning form of Protestantism. In Updike’s novels, the hot promises of simple, unparadoxical fulfillment in freedom, sex and religion prove—again and again—to be cold comfort to their practitioners. As this chapter shows, what Updike’s characters most fervently seek—what may be called the Calvinistic qualities of grace, true freedom, the good—generally is lost.

This conclusion focuses on the published writings of Pulitzer-Prize winner Marilynne Robinson, who, in her works of nonfiction and fiction, has engaged the negative stereotypes that are often associated with John Calvin and his heirs. In some of her nonfiction work, she argues that historical reputation matters, and that John Calvin has been unfairly maligned. Especially in The Death of Adam, Robinson presents a case for why it is important to reckon fairly with the legacy of Calvin. In works of fiction—Gilead and Home—Robinson gives the Calvinist tradition an embodied existence, where it can be examined and (through the imagination) experienced in such a way that the complexity and vigor of the tradition may be appreciated. In this way, the conclusion argues, she may be creating a "home" for Calvin in American culture that moves beyond the caricatured and stereotyped textbook image.

This chapter focuses on Calvinism and the mood of Calvin's preaching. Calvin is not typical of those of his followers who ministered within the Holy Roman Empire and who most assuredly agreed with him on the core doctrines of predestination and the atonement. Calvin is in fact more dour than most and as disciplinary as any, a man of determination to impress upon his listeners their utter worthlessness. Calvin and his fellow Reformers leave intact, however, the miracle of the sweating of blood because it is useful to them in underscoring the external evidence of the inner tumult of the Lord as he faced the prospect of degrading execution. Otherwise, they depart drastically from Catholic practice, and indeed from some of their Lutheran counterparts. They render the Passion of Christ mainly psychological even though the Bible testifies to Jesus's horrific physical ordeal.

This chapter focuses on anti-Jewish messages in Passion sermons. It shows that conventions of anti-Semitic utterance in preaching on the Crucifixion did not soften with the coming of the Reformation. Post-Reformation Catholic preachers continued to tap them with full enthusiasm, and Lutheran and Reformed clergy all drew upon them. However, in the basic dimension of the derogation of the Jews, differences are evident among the three leading denominations. Catholic divines treated the Jews rhetorically as the perpetrators of the most ferocious torture upon Jesus. Lutheran pastors retained the conviction that the Jews were indeed the authors of the gravest offenses against Christ. These remain most assuredly physical, even though the tendency within the evangelical movement is to damp down not just the length of Passion preaching—which itself would curtail elaboration—but also the sensual horror of the Crucifixion. John Calvin and his Reformed followers rendered the Jews' culpability yet more abstract. They adhered to it faithfully, but they turned the figure of the treacherous Jewish mob into a metaphor for their verminously sinful human charges, including themselves.

This chapter examines the context of the Protestant Reformation and explores the centrality of the cross in the theologies of the Reformers, especially Luther and Calvin. Both Reformers espoused a form of the theory of Christ's “penal substitution” for sinful humanity in his suffering on the cross. The emphasis on the Bible as the “word of God” resulted in iconoclasm on the part of some Reformers, and a devaluation of the pictorial arts for others. Albrecht Dürer is presented as a transitional figure, showing elements of both late medieval devotionalism and of the new humanist approach in his many portrayals of the Passion. Lukas Cranach exemplifies the direct influence of Luther on art, both thematically and in technique.

This chapter sets out a model of (theistic) faith as doxastic venture — understood, not as believing ‘at will’, but rather as taking a proposition to be true in one's practical reasoning while recognizing its lack of adequate evidential support. This doxastic venture model is contrasted with alternative models of specifically Christian faith (such as those of Calvin and Aquinas) that locate the venture of faith elsewhere. The conceptual and psychological possibility of doxastic venture is defended by appeal to William James's notion of ‘passional’ causes for belief in The Will to Believe. The possibility, raised by Richard Swinburne amongst others, that faith may involve only sub-doxastic venture (acting on the assumption that God exists without actual belief) is also acknowledged.

This chapter examines the origins of Samuel Clarke's Arianism. It argues that Clarke was merely setting out the logical consequences of the highly subordinationist strain in christology that had become increasingly influential within the Church of England during the later 17th century. That strain can be traced back to Episcopius's rejection of Calvins's assertion that that Son can properly be described as autotheos in relation to his divine nature, and was exemplified in Bull's celebrated defence of the Nicene creed. The chapter argues that the Anglican Reformed refused to adopt this subordinationist approach, and continued to contend for the medieval catholic consensus on the matter, which was itself rooted in the decress of the Fourth Lateran Council.

This chapter is the first of several which attempt to locate the typical usages of words in historical documents, in this case the Formularies of Faith of Henry VIII. Whatever differences did or did not exist between Luther, Calvin, the Catholic Church, Henry VIII, or his Bishops on the correct understanding of the relation between Church and State, none of them thought in terms of a modern separation between religion and a neutral, nonreligious polity. Religion as encompassing Christian Truth does not suddenly disappear with the Reformation challenge to the Catholic Church State but is fundamental to the thinking of both Luther and Calvin, albeit formulated in significantly different ways. Though the stress on interiority and ethical intention, and the rejection of “outward” rituals and merely “external” shows of faith, was a crucial ingredient in the development of the later essentializations of “religion” and “the secular,” a close examination of Protestant texts shows that we can only retrospectively claim to find possible glimmerings of these later distinctions.

This chapter presents a brief overview of John Calvin’s life and the stereotypes that surround many assessments of that life. The usefulness of such stereotypes is questioned, for they can not only impede the study of Calvin the man but they also can cloud one’s understanding of Calvin’s influence in American culture, one that can be traced not only through the positive appropriations of the Calvinist tradition but also through the ways in which even people who reject that tradition end up wrestling with the fruits of Calvin’s influence. There then follows a short narrative tracing the movement of Calvinism from Europe to the New World. Finally, there is a brief introduction to the contents of the book through a brief summary of each of the chapters.

This chapter explores the mixed history of Calvin’s influence on economic mores and practices in early America. It retraces Calvin’s ideal for economic discipline over the emergent market in Geneva. It shows how three different communities in colonial America transposed Calvinist ideals: Puritans in Boston, with their localized conceptions of social order; Dutch Reformed leaders in New York, with their urbane mercantile associations; and Huguenots in Charleston, with their dispersed social networks. Calvin promulgated a flexible and pragmatic approach to scripture that allowed his adherents to adapt economic instruction to the needs of their religious communities. Early American Calvinists followed this method when they transformed their teaching about commerce and the nascent market economy in the context of colonization. Throughout, this chapter challenges how the Weber thesis has been misapplied to the American context.