John Calvin-Life,Legacy and Theology

JOHN CALVIN : LIFE, LEGACY AND THEOLOGY -
PROF. M. M. NINAN
The larger colony of Massachusetts Bay was founded in 1628-30, and by 1640 more than 20,000
Puritans had arrived. These were the flower of the Puritan movement, and they were led by such
men as John Cotton, Thomas Mather, and John Davenport, all from Cambridge. Their Calvinism
was not a rigid and static system, and they weren’t happy with either episcopacy or Presbyterianism.
Slowly congregationalism spread throughout the Puritan colonies, though retaining elements of
Presbyterianism. Thomas Hooker promoted political suffrage to all free men, even if they weren’t
communicants in the church. In 1636 Roger Williams, who for his ideas of separation of church and
state had been ousted from Massachusetts, founded at Providence the colony of Rhode Island, where
he allowed just about anyone to come. 1636 also saw the founding of Harvard College. Some of
the Puritans stressed the responsibility of men, others of the goodness of God; still others the entire
Calvinist pattern of theology. Various synods were held to decide major issues facing the Church.
The Westminster Confession was adopted bodily, except for the sections dealing with polity and
discipline. Cotton Mather’s writings, among others, indicate the acceptance of essentially
Presbyterian views of the ministry. But the moral character of people started to slide, and revival
would not come fully until Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening.
New Englanders were the most famous Calvinists to settle in America before 1700, but they were
certainly not the only ones. The Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, later New York, had established
their Reformed church by 1640 (by 1665, the Dutch had also established it in South Africa, which still
remains a bastion of the Dutch Reformed church). After 1685, some two thousand Huguenots, fleeing
France after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, reestablished their Reformed churches after
settling in places as far apart as Boston and South Carolina. Soon afterward, thousands of Scots-Irish
colonists from Ulster (Northern Ireland) fled in order to escape Protestant persecution; they settled
mostly in the middle colonies and formed their first presbytery at Philadelphia by 1706. Methodism,
the largest neo-Calvinist Protestant church in America, arrived there by the mid-eighteenth century.
As the history of Calvinist emigration to America testifies, such seventeenth-century intra-Protestant
confessional quarrels were often high-stakes issues for laymen. They were even more so for clerics
because public authorities quickly removed ministers from theologically incorrect factions. After 1619,
Remonstrants were deprived throughout the Netherlands; in Scotland, many Episcopalians were
deprived after 1639, and Presbyterians were deprived in about one-fourth of its thousand parishes
after 1661. The situation was worst in Stuart England, which exceeded its previous pastoral purges
under the Tudors in 1553 and 1559. During the Puritan Revolution, over two thousand of England's
nine thousand parishes lost Royalist pastors for being insufficiently Calvinist. After the Restoration of
1660 gave the Church of England a head (Charles II) who had once remarked that "Presbyterianism is
not a religion for gentlemen," two thousand more were removed as insufficiently Episcopalian. After
the Glorious Revolution of 1688, another four hundred British clergy were deposed for refusing to
swear allegiance to William and Mary.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/christianity/protestant-denominations/calvinism
https://banneroftruth.org/us/resources/articles/2009/an-outline-of-the-life-of-john-calvin/Reormer/
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