By the beginning of the Thirty Years War the Calvinist movement had become stridently confessional and militant. Its militancy, indeed, made of it one of the precipitating causes of the war. It is important to understand this militancy. From the beginning the Calvinist version of Protestantism had displayed three characteristics, all of them considerably accentuated by 1618. [1] Together they help to explain the movement's militancy.



I. Internationalism

A first characteristic of Calvinism was its internationalism. It was far more international and cosmopolitan than other forms of Protestantism. Indeed it rivaled Roman Catholicism in its internationalism. The Lutheran forms of Protestantism that had preceded Calvinism were heavily Germanic in character. They took root primarily within the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. They were intimately connected to early signs of German national consciousness. Even when they spread beyond the geographic reaches of the Empire, they tended to take root primarily in enclaves of Germans. Only the Scandinavian nations provide an important exception to this generalization, and they were very much within a German cultural orbit. The radical sects generated by the Protestant Reformation were similarly primarily German and were most of them also local and ephemeral. The only radical groups that seemed to have won wide support and that displayed staying power were the Bohemian brethren, largely restricted to Bohemia, and the Mennonites, largely restricted to the Netherlands and adjoining parts of Germany. Calvinism, on the other hand, became truly international. It became the dominant form of Protestantism in France, the country from which Calvin himself and his principal associates came. In alliance with Zwinglianism, it became the dominant form of Protestantism in Switzerland, including areas of both Germanic and French culture. It became the dominant form of Protestantism in that part of the Netherlands then in the process of becoming an independent country. It became the dominant form of Protestantism in Britain, including both Scotland, which witnessed the triumph of a relatively pure Calvinism, and England, whose state church combined Calvinist theology with more traditional forms of liturgy and ecclesiastical government. It became the dominant form of Protestantism in Hungary, albeit with an episcopal form of church government more like the English than other Calvinist churches. It appealed to substantial segments of th nobility in Bohemia and Poland. It won support for brief periods of time in pockets of Italy, notably the city-state of Lucca, and in Spain. Within the Empire, Calvinism became the only really important alternative to Lutheranism. By 1618, it had won the support of leaders in two of the seven electoral principalities - the Palatinate and Brandenburg. It had also won support in a considerable variety of smaller German states, most of them in the western parts of the Empire, near the frontiers with the Netherlands and France.

The international character of Calvinism was constantly reinforced by patterns of migration. Calvin himself and his closest associates were refugees from their native France to Geneva. Many of the leaders of early Dutch Calvinism had spent periods of time as refugees in London, German cities like Emden, and elsewhere. Many of the leaders of early British Calvinism had spent periods of time as refugees in German and Swiss cities, during the reign of Mary Tudor. They all shared an experience of exodus and diaspora that demonstrated and sharpened the depth of their religious commitments, and that bound them together. These international exchanges continued even after Calvinism became settled in several of these countries. The academies and universities that became the most important centers for the training of Calvinism's intellectual elite - Geneva, Heidelberg, and Leiden - were from the beginning designed to train students for an international movement, and they continued to draw considerable numbers of their teachers and students from other countries. [2] They were not designed, like some German universities, primarily to serve a home area.

The international character of Calvinism helps explain its appeal to many of the German governments that assumed important roles in the Thirty Years War. When a Union of evangelical principalities and cities of Calvinist sympathy was formed under the leadership of Christian von Anhalt in 1608, for example, it was formed partly in the hope of gaining support for their political aims from French Huguenot aristocrats and Dutch Calvinists led by the princes of Orange. When the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, was married in 1613 to the Princess Elisabeth, daughter of James I of England, the marriage had been arranged partly in the hope of gaining English support for the policy of German Calvinists in the Empire. When the Bohemian Estates had invited Frederick V to become their king in 1619, in preference to Ferdinand, it had been partly in the hope of gaining international help for their hopes of a government less dependant on their powerful Hapsburg neighbors. The course of events was to prove these hopes to be illusions, but the fact that they could exist is testimony to the international character of Calvinism.



II. Discipline

A second characteristic of Calvinism was its emphasis on discipline. This may well be what distinguished it most sharply from its Lutheran competition. Official Lutheran pronouncements insisted that there were only two notae or marks of a true church: the true preaching of the Gospel and the right administration of the sacraments. In the words of the authoritative Confession of Augsburg, a group of people constituted a true church if among its members "evangelium pure docetur et recte administrantur sacramenta." Calvin, however, insisted with growing vehemence that it was essential for Christians not only to accept true belief but also to display true behavior. He did not include this formula in most of his own writings, but several of his followers and associates did, most notably Peter Martyr Vermigli. [3] And several of the Reformed national confessions added a third nota or mark of the true church to the two professed by Lutherans, the mark of discipline, designed to ensure the display of true Christian behavior. Emphasis on discipline was visible from the beginning of the Calvinist movement. When Calvin assumed leadership of the Reformed Church of Geneva in 1541, he had insisted that an institution be created with powers to control the behavior of everyone in the community. It was called the consistory and was a joint ecclesiastical and secular body with sweeping powers to examine and amend the behavior of every single person in the community, no matter what his or her social station might be. [4] Calvin worked hard to make it succeed. When its powers were challenged in later years he threatened to leave Geneva, and finally won general support for its activity. Similar institutions were created in almost every community in which Calvinists became established. [5] They are perhaps best known for their efforts at controlling sexual behavior, in order to protect the integrity of the Christian family. In so doing they were assuming some of the functions exercised by bishops' courts in Catholic countries, which often had primary if not exclusive jurisdiction over problems involving marriages. Like these predecessor institutions, consistories did in fact often hear breach of promise cases and tried to decide whether legitimate promises of marriage had in fact been exchanged and whether a couple therefore should be required to live together. They also untangled cases of bigamy, deciding which of several marriages was the legitimate one. They also heard suits for divorce, and had the power to recommend permission to remarry, something which had not been possible in Catholic courts. And they also acted as morals courts, conducting strenuous campaigns to limit or abolish fornication and adultery. But consistories also tried to control many other types of behavior. They often tried to regulate businessmen, to prevent usury (excessive charges for interest on loans6, and to prevent other kinds of sharp practice. They often tried to regulate religious behavior, to wean people away from traditional Catholic rituals and introduce them to Protestant substitutes, to prevent them from backsliding and returning to Catholicism, to warn them away from radical religious alternatives. They often tried to see to the maintenance of public order, for example reprimanding and punishing those convicted of public drunkenness, a frequent problem in the German Calvinist city of Emden. [6] Often the consistories' most important function was simply to resolve quarrels, whether between husbands and wives, business partners, or near neighbors. Indeed they often seem to have been more compulsory counselling services than judicial institutions.

The exact range of the powers exercised by consistories, to be sure, depended on the support the Calvinists could gain in each community for their program. Full control of all behavior was possible only in areas like Geneva or Scotland where Calvinists also controlled the local governments. In areas like France, where Calvinists were usually protected minorities, or the Netherlands, where substantial communities of Mennonites and Catholics were permitted to live in coexistence with the Calvinists, the consistories necessarily became more exclusively ecclesiastical institutions and their reach had to be limited.

As a result, where Calvinism succeeded, one found tightly disciplined populations, populations where traditional excesses of behavior were systematically discouraged and diminished. The success of this discipline is suggested by a variety of indexes. Rates of illegitimate birth, for example, typically dropped to very low levels. The frequent success of Calvinists in creating discipline could prove very attractive to a government, charged, as a government always is, with maintaining public order. When the Elector Palatine Frederick III in the preface to the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 sought to justify his decision to adopt the Calvinist version of the Protestant faith, it was explicitly because he felt it would encourage a "reformatio vitae" to accompany a "reformatio doctrinae." [7] Other German governments may also have been attracted to Calvinism in the hope it could introduce a welcome discipline among their subjects.



III. Theology of Divine Sovereignty

A third characteristic of Calvinism was the emphasis on divine sovereignty that was the most obvious feature of its theology. The majesty and omniscience and omnipotence of a transcendent God was emphasized among its theologians to a greater degree than among most Christian churches. This emphasis on God's power helps to explain many of the theological differences that came to separate Calvinism from both Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism, the significant confessional alternatives in Germany of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The issue about which there was the most acrimonious debate in the period itself was the problem of explaining what occurs in the central Christian sacrament of the eucharist. Lutherans agreed with Catholics in insisting that the body of Christ is physically present in the elements of bread and wine served in the eucharist. Calvinists insisted that the risen body of Christ is located only in heaven, at the right hand of God, and cannot be pulled down by the action of human priests to the altars at which the eucharist is served. Christ is present at the eucharist, to be sure, in spirit, and Calvinists even suggested that the souls of true believers rise to heaven during the course of the sacrament to commune with the risen Christ in his resurrected body. To that extent it may be said that Christ is bodily present during the eucharist. But they insisted that Christ cannot be pulled down from heaven and lend his body to transformation into manmade substances like bread and wine. Calvinists, indeed, often accused their opponents of advocating a form of cannibalism, of attempting to turn the body of Christ into gross food which, after digestion, would turn into excrement. These accusations enraged their opponents and led to increasingly bitter controversies. [8]

The strong emphasis on God's power also helps to explain Calvinist attachment to the doctrine by which it is most widely known even to the present, the doctrine of predestination. Most orthodox Christians, of course, accepted the Augustinian doctrine of predestination in one form or another. They accepted the early church's condemnation of the Pelagian heresy, the doctrine that Christians may win an eternal reward by their own merit, by their own free decisions to behave righteously, in conformity with God's commands. This was intolerable to Augustine and his followers. They felt this doctrine diminished unacceptably the power of God, that it suggested human beings were strong enough and wise enough to choose their own destiny, to tell the Almighty God that he must invite them into heaven. Augustine insisted that only God can be given credit for the salvation of an individual human soul. And he insisted furthermore that this decision had been made by God before the birth of each individual, that every soul that won the reward of eternal bliss was predestined to this end.

This doctrine left open several problems. It did not explain in detail the fate of the reprobate, of the majority of human beings damned to eternal punishment. Calvin and his followers insisted that the reprobate were also predestined, selected by God in advance for eternal punishment. They believed, in short, in double predestination, of the elect to salvation and of the reprobate to damnation. Most other Christians found this position extreme. They found that it made of God a tyrant, the author of evil. They preferred what has been called a doctrine of single predestination: God alone deserves credit for those who win salvation, and the saved are in fact predestined, but those who are damned are themselves responsible for their own fate by willfully rejecting God's offer of grace. To Calvinists this version of predestination was unacceptable. It diminishes the power of God. It suggests that men still retain enough strength to resist and defy God. It is also illogical. If God were powerful enough to predestine some to salvation he must also be powerful enough to predestine others to damnation.

Another problem left open by the Augustinian doctrine was a historical question. When did God decide that each individual would either deserve salvation or damnation? Had it been after the creation of Adam, the first man, when God discovered that his new creature was severely flawed, was so corrupt that he could not be trusted to deserve salvation, could win salvation only by God's gracious decision to save him in spite of his sins? Or had it been before Adam was created, perhaps before time itself existed? The former view was labeled infralapsarian, that God had made these decisions after the fall of the first man, Adam. The latter view was labeled supralapsarian, that God had anticipated the need for these decisions even before the creation of any man. Most Calvinists were supralapsarian. To suggest that God did not know that Adam would prove to be corrupt before his creation would be to suggest that God is less than omniscient. Therefore God must have decided the ultimate fate of each individual soul even before the beginning of creation, before time itself.

The Calvinist view of predestination was so strong that it was hard for many to accept, even within the Calvinist community itself. It began to come under attack during Calvin's own lifetime, and he fought back by developing it in ever more elaborate and dogmatic forms. Among Calvinists in the Netherlands there was a sharp split on this issue early in the seventeenth century. One party, led by a theologian named Arminius, tried to soften the Calvinist view of predestination. Its members prepared a five-point Remonstrance in 1610, containing suggestions for this softening. These points were: (1) God's eternal decree of salvation refers only to those who believe and persevere in the faith, not to non-believers; (2) Christ died to save all men, although only believers receive the benefit of his sacrifice. God wanted to save all mankind, in other words, but in the end could not; (3) Man can do nothing good until he is born again through the Holy Spirit, but after this rebirth he can do good; (4) Grace is not irresistible. God cannot force man to accept eternal salvation; (5) The faithful are assisted by grace to resist temptation and are kept from failing but only if they want Christ's help and are not inactive.

Another party among the Dutch vehemently rejected this Remonstrance as a crass betrayal of the doctrines of Calvin and their implications. It was led by a theologian named Gomarus. The controversy became so bitter that it threatened to split the entire Calvinist movement, not only in the Netherlands but beyond. Within the Netherlands the quarrel tended to pit some of the wealthier merchants in Amsterdam and other cities, who were attracted by the doctrines of Arminius, against many of the pious in rural areas who remained devoted to traditional Calvinism. It also split the government. Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Advocate of the province of Holland, supported the Arminians. Maurice of Nassau, the stadhouder of the Netherlands and in that capacity commander of their military forces, supported the Gomarists.

To resolve this controversy a synod designed to represent the entire international Calvinist community was called to the city of Dort in the Netherlands and met over a period of several months in 1618 and 1619. It included representatives not only from the Netherlands but also from such German states as the Palatinate, from Scotland and England, and from several independent cities that are now Swiss like Zurich and Geneva. The royal government of France prevented the attendance of Protestant delegates from that country. This synod finally reached decisions that substantially supported the Gomarist position. They committed the entire Calvinist movement to what came to be called the five points of Calvinism: (1) Unconditional election - God is completely free to predestine anyone to salvation, whether or not he foresees an individual will believe; (2) Limited atonement - Christ died only for those predestined to salvation; (3) Total depravity - man is so devastated by the fall that he can do nothing whatever to gain salvation; (4) Irresistible grace - the offer of divine grace is so powerful that man can do nothing to resist it; (5) Perseverance of the saints - those predestined to salvation cannot fall away or lose their final reward.

The canons of the Synod of Dort were widely accepted within the Calvinist communities throughout the world. At the very time the Thirty Years War was beginning within the Holy Roman Empire, therefore, the ideological leaders of international Calvinism had committed the entire movement to an unusually rigid and uncompromising version of predestination. And the political leaders who had supported these theologians, furthermore, did all within their power to guarantee the triumph of this point of view. Within the Netherlands itself there was a general crackdown led by Maurice of Nassau on the Remonstrants, as the followers of Arminius were generally called. Von Oldenbarnevelt was even put to death, and others, like the famous legal philosopher Hugo Grotius, were forced into exile.

It is of course doubtful that the rank and file among the Calvinists could follow in all its nuances the debates over predestination carried on at Dort. In fact Maurice of Nassau himself, the temporal leader of the hard-line Calvinist party is said to have confessed that he did not know whether predestination was blue or green. He was simply convinced that the party of Gomarus was right and the party of Arminius was wrong. But it is clear that enough of the doctrine of predestination percolated down to the grassroots to leave the average Calvinist convinced that God is so powerful that he decides the eternal fate of every single human being before any of us are born. Calvinists were thus committed to a worldview that is profoundly fatalist, that believes that everything that happens in this universe is decided by God. Most of them were further convinced that they were of the elect, that they were the saints of God, that they were predestined to eternal salvation and that there was nothing in this world or beyond that could deny them their reward.

History shows us that people with this fatalist mindset can become particularly militant. They can easily become convinced that they are God's chosen agents on earth, and that nothing can stop them. Even if they die in fighting for God's truth, an eternal reward awaits them. One finds striking parallels, for example, in Moslems committed to jihad, religious war against the infidel without any possibility of compromise or quarter. It was this mindset that helps to explain the psychology of the Calvinists who helped launch the Thirty Years War. Many of those mobilized by Christian von Anhalt on behalf of the Elector Palatine Frederick V, were convinced that they were the predestined elect of God, that God was on their side, that no power on this earth could resist them, that even if they were defeated in battle the defeat would be temporary, that ultimate victory was bound to be theirs.



IV. Consequences

Now that we have explained Calvinism's militancy, let us consider its consquences. The most obvious was war. Calvinists were at the cutting edge of particularly ferocious religious wars through much of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They began in France, with the French wars of religion, which devastated that country from 1562 to 1598, when the Edict of Nantes finally brought an end to them by conceding to Calvinists a modest degree of toleration. Calvinism in France emerged from these wars substantially reduced in numbers and in vigor. The St. Bartholomew's massacres of 1572 proved to be particularly devastating, leading large numbers of Calvinists to return to Catholicism and considerable numbers to emigrate to other countries. Wars of religion continued in the Netherlands, this time aimed as well at independence from the rule of Spain. They began with riots on a large scale in 1566, accelerating into open revolt in 1572 led by the princes of Orange, continuing throughout the period of the Thirty Years War in the Empire, concluding actually only with the peace of Westphalia, which, among its many provisions, finally recognized the independence of the northern United Provinces of the Netherlands as a new European state. Later in the seventeenth century militant Calvinists in both Scotland and England plunged their island into a religious civil war, the Puritan Revolution, beginning in 1640, in which monarchy was ended and the king put to death, to be replaced at first by a Parliamentary regime dominated by Calvinist Presbyterians allied with the Scots, and then by Cromwell's military dictatorship allied with Calvinist Congregationalist Independents.

In no country into which Calvinists helped provoke religious war, however, was the fighting as intense or the results as devastating as in the Holy Roman Empire. Calvinist militancy first began to take shape there in 1608, when Christian von Anhalt led in the organization of an evangelical Union of states sharing commitments to the Reformed version of Protestantism. It reached a peak at the court of the Palatinate, where von Anhalt, now acting as chief minister to the Elector, assembled a group of noblemen of Calvinist sympathy from all over Europe in what amounted to a general staff for their movement. [9] This group promoted the candidacy of Elector Frederick V for the crown of Bohemia, the move which so infuriated the Catholic Hapsburgs that it provoked the first stage of the Thirty Years War.

None of these wars, however, can be said to have led to a real victory for Calvinism. Indeed Calvinists suffered far more defeats than victories. In France, Calvinists saw their position as a tolerated minority increasingly eroded throughout the century. In 1629, following another episode of armed uprising, their primary stronghold of La Rochelle was reduced by royal armies to full obedience to the crown, and they lost most of their political rights, especially their right to maintain armed garrisons in selected cities. After Louis XIV personally assumed full control of the French government in 1661, Calvinists saw their rights further eroded and faced constant harassment, until the king unilaterally revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, making their very existence in the country illegal. In the Netherlands, Calvinists, in their eighty-years' war with the Spanish, lost all control of the southern ten provinces but won control of the seven northern provinces. Recent research makes it clear, however, that this victory was not a complete and unalloyed triumph for Calvinism. Substantial percentages of the population in the north remained Catholic or became Mennonite. Only a ruling elite, often a minority, were truly Calvinist. In Britain, twenty years of rule by Calvinists of one type of another, from 1640 to 1660, ended with a restoration of the monarchy and of the Church of England, now much less Calvinist in its theology than it had been back in the sixteenth century, and ever more strongly committed to traditional episcopal government and traditional types of liturgy.

In the Empire Calvinism was nearly crushed completely. In the battle of White Mountain in Bohemia, the forces assembled by von Anhalt on behalf of Frederick V were annihilated and the entire province forcibly re-Catholicized. Both Hussite churches that had existed for more than a century and Protestant churches of more recent foundation were forced to close. The Palatinate itself was occupied for a time by Catholic armies and Frederick driven out of the area altogether, forced to spend the rest of his life in exile in the Netherlands. In Hungary a group of vigorous Calvinists were forced into an enclave in the eastern part of the country where they managed to survive basically because advancing Turkish armies stemmed the Hapsburg advance and placed them under Islamic protection. The rest of that country, like Bohemia, was re-Catholicized. The Thirty Years War continued, of course, but with the main adversaries now becoming Lutheran and Catholic.

Calvinists, of course, did survive the Thirty Years War. Indeed the peace of Westphalia gave them a kind of legal standing they had never possessed before. The options of religious choice open to rulers within the Empire were no longer limited to Catholics and Lutheran adherents to the Augsburg Confession. There was now the third option of Calvinism.

Calvinists emerged from the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War, however, considerably sobered and chastened. They remained as international as ever. Indeed the periods of persecution and exile provoked by these wars often strengthened and deepened their international ties. They remained as committed to discipline as before, but generally only for their own communities, with little expectation of drawing others into networks of social control. For a time they remained as committed to the theology of a sovereign God who was solely responsible for predestining all mankind to salvation or damnation. But they began to waver on this point. During the middle decades of the seventeenth century a number of French theologians, most of them connected with the Academy of Saumur, most prominently Moise Amyraut, began to advance theories of divine election that softened the details of Calvinist predestination. In reaction several Swiss theologians worked out versions of that doctrine and of allied points of theological controversy that were even more extreme than those adopted at Dort. The most extreme official statement of this point of view ever developed may well be that found in the Helvetic Consensus of 1675, drafted in Zurich by Johann Heinrich Heidegger, in close consultation with François Turrettini of Geneva and other Swiss theologians, and formally accepted by the Reformed governments of Switzerland between 1675 and 1678, as a document to which all clergymen hired for work in their churches were required to subscribe. Unlike the canons of the synod of Dort, however, it did not win much support from Calvinists in other countries. Indeed it was soon challenged on behalf of German Calvinists by the Great Elector of Brandenburg, it was challenged by the English, it was challenged among Huguenots within France, and it did not remain acceptable to the Swiss themselves. In the next generation within Geneva its rejection was urged by the son of François Turrettini, Jean-Alphonse, who led the way to a more liberal and ecumenical form of Protestantism. Fewer and fewer Swiss governments required use of the Helvetic Consensus. After 1722, when it provoked further protests from Brandenburg and England, it fell into disuse. In succeeding years pietism and rationalism in many other parts of Europe made traditional Calvinism seem less and less credible.

By the early eighteenth century it was clear that Calvinism was fading away, that it was no longer sustaining the kind of militancy that could lead to religious wars. It survives to this day, to be sure, in forms that are more or less attenuated. But it is no longer the powerful political force it once was.

FOOTNOTES