Calvin. History and Reception of a Reformation Week 4. The Spread of Calvinism Sequence 3. Calvinism's First Steps beyond Europe Calvin's objective, and the objective of the French Protestants, the Huguenots, was not to form missions all over the world. Calvin's purpose, first and foremost, was to purify and reform the Church in Western Europe. Yet, as early as 1555, Reformed Protestantism traveled to the New World in an expedition sponsored by the admiral Gaspard de Coligny (who at the time had not yet converted to Protestantism),
to what he called "Antarctic France" -- in other words, Brazil. The ship dropped anchor in the bay of Rio, and the island where it landed still bears the name of its Huguenot captain, Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon. Villegagnon had studied law at the same time as Calvin in Orléans. In the fall of 1566, two Protestant ministers, Guillaume Chartier and Pierre Richier, embarked on a ship leaving for Brazil. Among the ship's passengers were 14 Genevans. On March 21, 1567, for the first time ever, the ship's passengers celebrated the Holy Communion according to the Genevan liturgy in the bay of Rio. Among them, a young man in his twenties, the future Reformed pastor Jean de Léry, would write a memoir describing these events, entitled "History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil" (1578). A few years later, a controversy surrounding the Lord's Supper, and the issue of enclosure in particular (whether Christ is enclosed in the bread and wine),
split the young colony in two. Villegagnon rejected what he considered a symbolic interpretation of the Lord's Supper and ordered the Huguenots to leave. Three Huguenot colonists drowned at his hands in the bay of Rio. The rest traveled back home to Europe. Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, having caused the whole undertaking to collapse, dissolved the colony and returned to France. In March 1560, the Portuguese, who were already close by, took control of what was left of the colony. Frank Lestringant has written several books about this fascinating adventure of the Huguenots in Brazil. In 1562, another expedition landed in Florida. Coligny wished to create a colony for French Protestants, who were under persecution, but also to curtail Spanish and Portuguese expansion. The Floridian colony was to suffer a fate even crueler than its Brazilian counterpart. In the fall of 1565, three short years after the arrival of the Huguenot settlers and their leader Jean Ribault, the Spanish army attacked the colony (known at the time as "Carolina," it was close
to modern-day Jacksonville). The attack resulted in the massacre of about 1,000 Huguenot settlers, including Jean Ribault and his soldiers who, having surrendered, expected to be taken prisoner. These events transpired a half-century before the landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, of the Mayflower Pilgrims, who were for the most part Congregationalists from England. These pilgrims, too, were fleeing persecution. They, too, were influenced -- though indirectly -- by Calvin's theology. The English "Puritans" had been so branded by their adversaries, the Catholics, in an attempt to stigmatize them as heretics, i.e., descendants of the Cathars (from the Greek
Greek "katharoi", meaning "the pure ones"). The Puritans, for their part, preferred to refer to themselves as "the godly." Thus an anglicized Calvinism flourished in New England. Among the major figures of New England Puritanism was the minister John Cotton, leader of a large congregation in Boston, who published a very successful catechism entitled "Milk for Babes" in 1656. Cotton was a fan of Calvin; he reportedly once declared: "I love to sweeten my mouth with a piece of Calvin before I go to bed." The New England Puritans were, for the most part, Congregationalists -- a rejection of Episcopacy in its traditional form. They adhered to the Westminster Confession of Faith, promulgated in 1647. Congregationalists far outnumbered the other denominations in the colony: Presbyterians, Lutherans, Reformed Protestants and Baptists. The Presbyterians were English-speaking Reformed Protestants. They were, for the most part, English or Scottish. Their name comes from the Greek "presbyteros" (from which the word "priest" is derived), meaning "elder" or "ancient." In a Christian community, an elder is someone who, though not ordained as a pastor, is given considerable responsibility. Presbyterianism grew rapidly in the United States under the impetus of such pioneers as Richard Denton, who arrived in the colony around 1635. The blossoming of Presbyterianism led to the creation of a new college, Princeton College, in 1746. Yet as early as 1636, six years only after the mass arrival of English Puritans, a college, which soon came to be known as Harvard College, had been created to educate and train
ministers for the new colony. It was the first institution of higher learning in North America, and it owed its early survival, in part, to a generous donation from the Puritan minister John Harvard, who died at age 31 in 1638. In its first year of existence, Harvard had a total of nine students, most of whom were ministers-in-training. In 1692, it adopted the motto "Veritas Christo et ecclesiae" -- "truth for Christ and the Church". Today, only the word "Veritas" remains. The words "Christo" and "ecclesiae" have been eliminated from the school's crest. Here is an excerpt from Harvard's internal regulations, dated 1646: "Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to
lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing
the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in
secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3)." To what extent did Puritan ideals, imported from Europe and representing the international dimension of Calvinism, influence and shape society in the colonies beyond the community's clerical elite? It's hard to say. In 1700, there were 93,000 Europeans in the colonies. Approximately one out of five was active in the Church. The Puritans' goal is well-known: to create an exemplary society, one that would be a light for the world, a "city on a hill." In other word, the perfect embodiment of life in a Christian community. At the time, their purpose had nothing to do with implementing democracy or capitalism. Whereas those who'd stayed in England gradually became more open and tolerant, the Puritans of the New World remained, to a large extent, stuck in their 16th century convictions. In 1788, the Presbyterian church (i.e., the Reformed anglophone church) had 177 pastors and 420 congregations. Yet even before the mass arrival of the Puritans, there were other Protestants in the New World -- a fact too often overlooked. Indeed, a strong Dutch presence preceded that of the Puritans. Before New York, there was New Amsterdam, established in 1624. Before New England, there was New Netherland ("Nova Belgica"). Before Harlem, there was Nieuw Haarlem; before Wall Street, Waal Straat. Everywhere the Dutch colonists settled, there were Reformed Protestants among them. It was only in September of 1664 that New Amsterdam became New York, when the city's Director-General, Pieter Stuyvesant, handed it over to the British. Significantly, both the Dutch, who arrived during the first quarter of the 17th century, and the English, most of whom landed a little later, were deeply influenced
by Protestantism and, for many, by Calvinism. Their churches adhered to the main confessional documents of Calvinism: for the Reformed, the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) and the Canons of Dort (1619); for the
Presbyterians, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647). The New World Protestants experienced two prolonged periods of revival, or what they called a "Great Awakening," the first during the 1730s and 1740s, the second towards the beginning
of the 19th century. Between 1782 and 1850, 28 Presbyterian colleges or universities were founded. Princeton Theological Seminary became the bastion of orthodox Calvinist theology,
led by two major figures: Charles Hodge and Benjamin Warfield. Other divinity schools, such as Mercersburg Seminary (Pennsylvania), adopted a different approach to Calvinism. Less puritanical, less insistent on the inerrancy of the Bible (i.e., its truth down to the
smallest iotas), they emphasized the importance of liturgy and the Patristic tradition. Let's look at Asia now. The first Protestant missions from the West arrived in China in 1807. The first Chinese translation of the Bible was published in 1824 -- quite late, considering that the early Jesuit Françis Xavier led a mission in Asia and came very
close to China, reaching the island of Shangchuan in 1552, the year of his death. This was followed by another Jesuit mission to mainland China in 1582; Matteo Ricci reached Beijing in 1601. Dutch Reformed missionaries were present in Taiwan as early as 1627. But Protestant missions did not begin as such until 1865. Japan saw the first arrival of Reformed Presbyterians in 1859. Thus it was only in the 20th century that the works of Calvin began to be studied and translated into Japanese. In Korea, Calvinism first acquired some influence, though very minor, in the 1880s. Now on to Africa: as early as the late 15th century, Catholic countries such as Portugal began to explore the African continent. It was through the Dutch that Protestantism, in its Reformed version, first gained a foothold on African soil. In 1652, the Dutch East India Company established a trading post at the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of the continent. It became a layover port and waystation for its vessels sailing to Jakarta (Batavia) and back. The commander of the trading post, Jan van Riebeeck, introduced the Dutch Reformed church, which, like the colony itself, grew rapidly in the years that followed. In fact, the Dutch Reformed Church was the only authorized faith in the colony. Even the French Huguenots, who arrived in the Cape in 1688, were required to become members of the Dutch Reformed Church. As far as Catholics, Lutherans, Jews and Muslims were concerned, any public show of these faiths was strictly forbidden. The history of Reformed Protestantism in South Africa is rich, complex and painful. In particular, it is marked by contradictory and polarizing attitudes concerning apartheid, an aspect we'll discuss specifically in an upcoming sequence. The rest of the African continent -- Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically -- became mission territory as of the second half of 19th century, for the most part. This time, it was no longer Dutch Protestants, but English-speaking Presbyterians and, to a lesser degree, French Reformed Protestants, who came to Central Africa as missionaries.
