A. H. Newman on Calvinism and religious liberty

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The year 2017 marks the 500th year since the Protestant Reformation was launched by Martin Luther's legendary nailing of his 95 theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517. And while John Calvin was only 8 years old when Luther began the protestant religious revolution, Calvin's theology became the standard expression of Reformed theology.

 

Some attribute to Calvin and Calvinism the development of our broad American liberties including "anti-statism, the belief in transcendent principles of law as the foundation of an ethical legal system, free market economics, decentralized authority, an educated citizenry as a safeguard against tyranny, and republican representative government which was accountable to the people and a higher law." Hence, some historians conclude “Calvin was virtually the founder of America.”

 

But if Calvin was founder of American liberties centuries before American liberties were actually founded, what role

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would Calvin and Calvinism play in what has been deemed the queen of all liberties, religious liberty?

 

One way to gauge Calvin's contribution toward religious liberty in America would be to examine the way Calvin's followers understood religious liberty. So, how did John Calvin's followers feel about religious liberty?

 

Baptist historian A.H. Newman demonstrates how post-Calvin Calvinists most likely felt about religious freedom by the way they treated the Mennonites.

 

From 1574 onward the Reformed (Calvinistic) church sought persistently to destroy the Mennonites, but they enjoyed the protection of William the Silent and afterward of Maurice of Nassau. The Synod of Dort in 1574 decided to exhort the government to tolerate no one who would not swear obedience to it, to compel the Mennonites to have their infants baptized, and in case of refusal to turn them over to the Reformed ministers to be dealt with. [...]

 

About 1601 a book of [Theodore] Beza's defending the execution of heretics was translated into Dutch and published, the chief object being to prepare the public mind for the slaughter of the Mennonites. In the preface it is argued that to tolerate heresy is to make peace with Satan. Only one church must be tolerated in the State.

 

In answer to the objection that some might raise to the persecution of heretics on the ground of loss of trade, etc., it is answered that it is better to have a city desolate and uninhabited than a thriving city full of heretics. In some places the Mennonites were refused the privilege of doing business or of holding meetings and their ministers were fined and ordered to go into banishment.¹

While Calvin and Calvinists may have been an undeniable influence in the Christian Church beginning in the Reformation era, it remains beyond difficult to imagine, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, that Calvin and Calvinism positively contributed to establishing religious freedom in the fabric of American culture and embedding it into the law of the land.

 

¹Newman, Albert Henry. A History of Anti-pedobaptism: From the Rise of Pepdobaptism to AD 1609. American Baptist Publication Society, 1902. 318-320

Comments

[Lydia]

The Calvinistic doctrines of election, reprobation, and the atonement are so repulsive to human reason that they can never obtain the assent of the mind, but through the medium of the passions; and the master passion of orthodoxy is fear.”
— John Quincy Adams —

"The Life of John Adams", page 53. Published in 1874. Started by John Quincy and completed by Charles Francis Adams. Free on Google books.

[Scott Shaver]

Calvinism, of its own historical record, deserves every ounce of beating and skepticism from baptists that it currently receives. It's like the Black Plague of the new albeit unimproved SBC