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<---- John Wiclif - Jan Hus - Martin Luther - Thomas Müntzer - John Calvin - Francois de Voltaire - Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Arthur Schopenhauer - Karl Marx + Friedrich Engels - Vladimir Lenin --->
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In his work 'Het leven van Johannes Calvijn' ("The life of John Calvin") D’Arbez concludes:
"Nowhere on earth is the legacy of Calvin stronger than in South Africa, where the spirit of Calvin has not waned due to the influence of the twentieth century, as has been the case, and still is the case, in the countries of Europe".
The contribution of the Huguenots in South Africa
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"The sixteenth century scholar Roland H. Bainton remarked that, when Christianity takes itself seriously, it must either renounce or master the world. Both these stances can be illustrated from the great upheaval which was the European Reformation. Many of the radical reformers rejected the coercive structures of contemporary society, refusing to swear oaths, hold any magisterial office, serve in any military capacity, or even bear arms. Such a radically apolitical and world-renouncing attitude inevitably entailed seperation from the world. Perhaps with the pre-Constantinian church - which existed within, but not as part of, the Roman Empire - as a model, the radicals often conceived of their communities as an 'alternative society' within, but not part of, the greater society which surrounded them.
The contrast with Calvinism could not be more marked. If any religious movement of the sixteenth century was world-affirming, it was Calvinism. Yet Calvinism affirmed the world in order to master it, addressing its specific situations rather than luxuriating in abstract speculation. Time and time again, in both his theology and his spirituality, Calvin refuses to indulge in easy generalizations or abstractions. [..]Throughout his writings, we find a determination to engage with the objective social existence of human beings, along with the problems and possibilities this brings with it. [...]Calvin addresses real and specific human situations - social, political and economic - with all the risks that this precision entails. [...]It is perfectly fair to describe Calvin's thought as 'theology anti-theological',
providing this is understood not to entail the absence of a theology, but to highlight the distinctly world-affirming and anti-speculative trajectory of his ideas. Calvin's 'secularisation of holiness' (Henri Hauser) involved bringing the entire sphere of human existence within the scope of divine sanctification and human dedication. It is this sanctification of life, of which the sanctification of work is the chief pillar, which stamped its impression upon Calvin's followers.
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The implication of Calvinism in the developement of concepts of natural human rights in Europe and North America has been stressed in several recent studies. The hostile attitude of sixteenth-century French monarchs towards their Calvinist subjects raised with acute force the questions of whether there existed limits to regal authority, and the obligation of subjects to obey it. The massacres of St Batholomew (1572) may be regarded as precipitating intense debate within Calvinist circles over the proper use of violence, the place of obedience, and the limits of civil authority. The success of the Calvinist Reformation in Scotland raised much the same questions, particularly in the aftermath of the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots (1567). An amalgam of biblical notions of justice and fidelity (with the Old Testament linked with the concept of a covenant between God and his people) with the ideas of later medieval contractarian writers resulted, centring upon the notion of government by justice,
rather than oppression. If these ideas originated in late sixteenth-century Europe, they were appropriated with vigour by American revolutionaries, determined to break what they regarded as the tyranny of the British monarchy over their existence. Jonathan Mayhew (1720-66) linked his politics with his religion when he declared that 'the hereditary, indefensible, divine right of kings, and the doctrine of non-resistance, which is built upon the supposition of such a right, are altogether as fabulous and chimerical as transubstantiation'. The outcome of this North American debate was the emergence of a covenantal understanding of human rights which, when linked with Calvin's appeal to natural law, gave rise to the notion of all humanity being created equal, with certain inalienable human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
If this notion of human rights characterized the American Revolution and its aftermath, it was not shared by all Calvinist writers. Two significant exceptions may be noted, sharing a common alternative approach to human rights. Whereas the Calvinist writers of the northern American states insisted that all humanity was created with equal rights, a number of southern Calvinist writers - such as Robert Lewis Dabney, Benjamin Morgan Palmer and James Henley Thornwell - argued that God created individuals with ethnic and social diversity of status. Where the northern theologians appealed to one notion of natural law, their southern colleagues appealed to one quite different in its origins and emphases. As a result, these southern Calvinist writers felt able to justify both the doctrine of seperate racial developement for whites and negroes and the continuation of the existing practice of slavery. On the eve of the American Civil War, two radically different Calvinist conceptions of human rights thus found themselves locked in mortal combat. The southerners would lose this particular battle, but their ideas live on in other places; until recently the Dutch Reformed churches in South Africa appealed to a similar notion in defending the doctrine of apartheid, just as some Ulster Protestants defend, on the same grounds, the excistence of the border between the predominantly Protestant north of Ireland from the predominantly Roman Catholic south. Diversity within Calvinism here finds its outworking in significant political controversies which are an integral part of the controversies of modern history.
[...]a significant conclusion (may) be drawn: To study Calvin is not merely to study the past - it is also to gain a deeper understanding of the present."
From Alister E. McGrath's biography - John Calvin (1990)
Calvin's works
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