Calvinism: A History

by Darryl G. Hart

Publisher:

Yale University Press

, 2013

Overview

The first single-volume history of Reformed Protestantism from its sixteenth-century origins to the present.

This briskly told history of Reformed Protestantism takes these churches through their entire 500-year history—from sixteenth-century Zurich and Geneva to modern locations as far flung as Seoul and São Paulo. D. G. Hart explores specifically the social and political developments that enabled Calvinism to establish a global presence.

Hart’s approach features significant episodes in the institutional history of Calvinism that are responsible for its contemporary profile. He traces the political and religious circumstances that first created space for Reformed churches in Europe and later contributed to Calvinism’s expansion around the world. He discusses the effects of the American and French Revolutions on ecclesiastical establishments as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century communions, particularly in Scotland, the Netherlands, the United States, and Germany, that directly challenged church dependence on the state. Raising important questions about secularization, religious freedom, privatization of faith, and the place of religion in public life, this book will appeal not only to readers with interests in the history of religion but also in the role of religion in political and social life today.

Key Features

• Explores the history of Reformed Protestantism through its 500-year span and various continents
• Follows Calvinism as an expression of western Christianity that emergened in central Europe and gradually established itself all throughout the continent and around the world
• Examines the unlikely ways by which Calvinism became a global belief

Contents

• City Lights
• God’s Fickle Anointed
• To Rebel and to Build
• Shaking the Foundations
• Taking the Word of the World
• New Communities in the Land of the Free
• An Exhausted Europe
• Reformation Reawakened
• Missionary Zeal
• Kirk Ruptured and Church Freed
• The Netherlands’ New Way
• American Fundamentalists
• The Confessing Church
• Conclusion

Product Details

• Title: Calvinism: A History
• Author: Darryl G. Hart
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Print Publication Date: 2013
• Logos Release Date: 2025
• Pages: 352
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subject: Calvinism › History
• ISBNs: 9780300148794, 0300148798
• Resource ID: LLS:CALVINISMAHST
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T17:54:22Z

About Darryl G. Hart

D. G. Hart, studied American history at the Johns Hopkins University and has served as director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College and academic dean and professor of church history at Westminster Seminary in California. He is currently visiting assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.