Some classic works on the origins of modernity gave pride of place to Calvinism. Max Weber famously made it the fount of capitalist economics; Robert K. Merton, that of experimental science; Michael Walzer, of political radicalism. In his new history of Reformed churches, D. G. Hart will have none of it. Rather than shaping modern life, he argues, Calvinism developed in reaction to it—sometimes in the negative sense of the word.
Calvinists have not been power brokers with a plan; instead, they have been ordinary folk who, their predestinating deity notwithstanding, found their way to an authentic ecclesiastical tradition by “accidental” and “unlikely ways.” The tradition has managed to spread from “marginal cities in central Europe” to all parts of the globe, but only by considerable trial and one persistent error—the aspiration to be part of the political or social establishment, to take charge of society, to be the culture formers that Merton and Weber espied. To that temptation only a very few have been immune, and they have remained so by adhering to strictly defined forms of doctrine, liturgy, and, above all, polity. That, in sum, is the author’s point of view.
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