Calvin. History and Reception of a Reformation Week 4. The Spread of Calvinism Sequence 8. Awakenings and Missions Today, Calvin's spiritual heirs can be found mainly outside of Europe. They are in Asia, in America, in Africa, in Oceania... Yet Calvin envisioned the Reformation -- his Reformation -- as a movement meant above all for France, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, Scotland, etc. In short, for the Old Continent. The transition from Europe to the other continents was not a self-evident matter. Indeed, in Calvin's view, the New Testament verse "Go then, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19), though clearly an injunction to evangelize, was not
truly meant for Christians. This is one of the problematic aspects of Calvin's thought, as his vision is very clearly at odds with the way we see things today. His priorities were elsewhere. First, for strategic reasons: it was more important to defend the Protestants as they resisted Catholicism and the Counter-Reformation. Also because there were, in his mind, other priorities in terms of bringing certain people to the 'true faith' (i.e., faith as he conceived it). This included Catholics as well as, perhaps surprisingly for us, Jews and Muslims. Calvin considered Muslims as a Christian sect, in the same way as that is true of Catholics, and that these two heresies (Islam and Catholicism) corresponded to the two realms of the
empire referred to in Scripture, Muhammad and the Pope being the two corresponding Antichrists. Though hardly sympathetic to the Pope and to Muhammad, this view does, so to speak, include them in the family. Both religions are monotheistic; thus there is no doubt for Calvin that their followers are seeking, albeit in a heretic manner, the true God. Anyone else was relegated by Calvin to a secondary and more remote circle. Yet there is another reason as well: for Calvin, the era of the Apostles had ended; the Apostolic Era is over. In his commentaries on the verse from the end of Matthew's gospel (Matthew 28:19), Calvin does not deny that the Apostles were charged, as reported by Scripture, with evangelizing all the nations. But this Apostolic Age is behind us, says Calvin. To quote him directly: "The ministry of the apostles was established only for the time necessary to build churches where none existed." The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) expresses it even more clearly: "The apostles did not stay in any particular place, but throughout the world gathered together different churches. When they were once established, there ceased to be apostles,
and pastors took their place, each in his church." In other words, there can be new prophets -- Calvin assuredly considered himself one -- but as far as apostles are concerned, even though God could theoretically
appoint new ones, this possibility seemed doubtful to Calvin, who felt that, in any event,
apostles were no longer required for evangelization. Quite clearly, such an outlook is based on fairly far-fetched assumptions. It assumes, for one, that twelve apostles were able, in a limited timeframe, to evangelize the entire world. It also assumes that the descendants of those who rejected the apostles' message fifteen centuries earlier would necessarily reject it themselves, as if somehow bound by their ancestors' rejection. Furthermore, it assumes that only peoples, not individuals, can be converted. To our ears, these assumptions all sound rather tenuous. But they posed no problem for Calvin. In Calvin's words: "Christ, we know, penetrated with amazing speed, from the east to west, like the lightning’s flash, in order to bring into the Church the Gentiles
from all parts of the world." Thus Calvin considered it an easy task to refute the objection according to which there remained people in remote areas of the world who had never gotten the opportunity
to hear of Christ's existence and message. In reference to the verse quoted earlier, Matthew 28:19, which commands the apostles to evangelize all the nations, Calvin writes: "It was decreed that the Kingdom of Christ would spread throughout the earth by the preaching of the Gospel. And indeed this has already taken place. The Gospel has been preached. The Word has been announced to all living creatures, as the Lord Himself commanded." Thus the Reformed Protestants who, during Calvin's lifetime or shortly thereafter, traveled to Brazil or Florida did so not with the aim of converting indigenous populations, but to form
Christian republics in places where they would not be hindered as they were in Europe. Here we have a dark side, then, in the history of Protestant and Reformed missionary efforts. Indeed, just like Lutherans, Reformed Protestants were unconcerned with any missionary work. The Church exists to preach the Word and administer the sacraments to Christians, not to evangelize the world. Things were totally different, however, among Catholics of the time. Ignatius of Loyola, for instance, upon converting, immediately set out to convert pagans, recruit Muslims in Jerusalem, and
even bring back new followers from China (a goal achieved later on by Francis Xavier). Thus, because of Calvin's interpretation concerning the Apostolic Age, Reformed Protestants eschewed missionary work as a way to attract new followers from
around the world to the Reformation. Theodore Beza, for example, mocked the efforts of Jesuit missionaries among the indigenous populations of the Americas, likening them to "dancing grasshoppers" and quoting
the following verse: "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte" (Matthew 23:15). So the idea of Christian evangelization, far from being praised, was ridiculed. The situation changed dramatically, however, in the 18th century. During the 17th century, several movements within Reformed Protestantism had the means and resources to undertake missionary efforts in faraway lands. The Dutch East India Company, for example, sent ship after ship to the far corners of the world, and to Asia in particular. All of these ships carried pastors, but the latter were sent for the sake of the European settlers, not to reach indigenous populations. The Company even established an "Indian Seminary" in Leiden (Holland) -- and while the name might suggest it was designed to train ministers to evangelize among native Indians,
this was not the case at all. If the right circumstances arose, baptizing an indigenous Indian was of course a possibility, but this represented a very secondary concern. The seminary's primary purpose was to ensure that Dutch settlers in India received proper religious guidance and remained firmly established within the Reformed faith. Things started to change in the 18th century. And this change did not come from within the Reformed Church, but as a result of more oblique, almost marginal, currents. Case in point: the Moravian Brotherhood was a group of independent Protestant churches, affiliated with neither Calvinism nor Lutheranism. All of a sudden, the Moravian Church decided to evangelize Greenland. Their missionary efforts then expanded to Labrador, Mongolia, Curaçao, the Antilles, etc. Thus, marginal religious movements were the first to undertake significant evangelization efforts. By the mid-18th century, these efforts had exerted a strong
influence on the Reformed Church. In the United States -- or rather, the British colonies in North America --, the early 18th century saw the rise of a phenomenon known as the "Great Awakening". This movement was heavily influenced by Puritanism and featured successive "awakenings" or "revivals", that is, rediscoveries of a lively, dynamic faith requiring not only a renewed sense of
moral responsibility, i.e., active charity, and the spreading of the Biblical message, but also the conversion of "brothers" who had not yet been afforded the opportunity to "know the Lord." The main point for us to apprehend is that each of these successive revivals -- and the same could be said of all the awakenings experienced by the Reformed Church, not only during the 18th
century, but during the 19th and the first half of the 20th as well -- featured a return
to Calvinistic themes. Yet, at the same time, they involved major reinterpretations of Calvin's thought. Significantly, the Church's theological emphasis shifted away from the notion of God's sovereignty and increasingly towards God's glory, the agency of the Holy Spirit and the necessity of actively
serving one's fellow man. What mattered to all these movements was not Calvin himself, but how to reinterpret Calvin in the light of the Gospel; to criticize Calvin's thought in the name of the very Gospel that he
professed to serve and to announce. Thus the history of the Reformed Protestant tradition has come to be defined not solely by Calvin, but also by the requirement -- set forth by Calvin himself -- of continual transformation ("ecclesia reformata
semper reformanda"), i.e., the necessity for the Church to constantly return to its true
source (the Gospel) and to challenge existing interpretations, including those of its original Reformer.
