A politics of piety: The latent modernity of Calvin's Christian philosophy (John Calvin)

The relation of Calvin's thought to a set of distinctively modern political commitments has long intrigued observers. While once accepted as close to self-evident, however, the idea that there should be a positive connection tends to be received with skepticism today. Nonetheless, the resilience of this idea is well-founded, and it would be dismissed, as this study shows, at a considerable loss to our understanding of Calvin's importance.; In the economic realm, where Calvin's affinity to modernity continues to be most widely accepted, the great influence of Weber's seminal study on the Protestant Ethic has tended to obscure the dynamic by which a focus on life in this world—and thus a remarkable impetus for social organization and economic activity—follows directly from Calvin's understanding of piety. Rather than following Weber, whose interpretation presupposes a crucial reversal on central points of Calvin's teachings, this study demonstrates, in its first part, that Calvinist worldliness is only seemingly paradoxical even at its most orthodox. From this foundation, the study proceeds, in the second part, to discussing Calvin's more explicitly political conceptions. Thus chapters one and two explore the demands for limited government and conditional political obligation—and thence the right to resistance against tyrannical regimes—in relation to what Calvin had to say about the authority of government and its limits; chapter three traces the move towards an understanding of political community as contractually based; and chapters four and five examine the path leading the Calvinist saints into a new kind of militancy, fostering equalization and democracy within their ranks at the expense of a stark politicization of relations with those outside the bounds of their community.; In all cases, this study finds Calvin opening the way to a new politics only to block further movement along a path he deemed too dangerous to pursue. At all these points, then, modernity appears to be little more than a step removed from where Calvin was treading—albeit a step that Calvin resisted vehemently, confirming by his very vehemence how strongly the momentum he initiated, in many ways inadvertently, tended in such a direction.