Calvin and Calvinism in Germany

Abstract

Calvin’s experience of Germany was limited and partial, but his theology played an important role there. It came to be associated with a kind of Protestant internationalism, while specific points of his doctrine formed a polemical cypher used by some German Lutherans, many in the service of imperial princes, against Philip Melanchthon in the last decade of his life and against Melanchthon’s students in the next generation. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the effort to build a Lutheran identity at peace with the Holy Roman Empire’s complex political and religious subsidiarity made ‘Calvinism’ its contrary and reified German ‘Calvinism’ as a polemical glyph. Out of political and doctrinal turmoil, the ‘Reformed’ territorial churches of Germany emerged. These churches were finally recognized in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), but eventually they yielded to a national Protestant church in the nineteenth century. In short, the history of Calvinism in Germany was marked by a complex, evolving fusion of doctrinal differentiations and imperial politics.