Calvin and the Reformation: The Political Education of Protestantism

The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to two aspects of the political ideas of the sixteenth century Reformation which were important to the development of the Western tradition of political theory. First, like all great transformations, the Reformation stimulated the rethinking of much that had been taken for granted. In terms of political ideas, this centered around a developing crisis in the concept of order and in the Western traditions of civility. The criticism of the papacy by the early reformers had really amounted to a demand for the liberation of the individual believer from a mass of institutional controls and traditional restraints which hitherto had governed his behavior. The medieval church had been many things, and among them, a system of governance. It had sought, not always successfully, to control the conduct of its members through a definite code of discipline, to bind them to unity through emotional as well as material commitments, and to direct the whole religious endeavor through an institutionalized power structure as impressive as any the world had seen. In essence, the Church had provided a rationalized set of restraints designed to mould human behavior to accord with a certain image. To condemn it as the agent of the Antichrist was to work towards the release of human behavior from the order which had formed it. This liberating tendency was encouraged by one of the great ideas of the early reformers, the conception of the church as a fellowship bound together by the ties of faith and united in a common quest for salvation. But the Genossenschaft-idea lacked the complementary notion of the church as a corpus regens, a corporate society welded together by a viable structure of power. The inference remaining was that men could be fashioned to live in an orderly community without the serious and consistent application of force.