Tradition · 1519

Reformed

The Protestant churches that began with Zwingli’s reforms in Zurich (from 1519) and were shaped above all by John Calvin in Geneva. They include the Presbyterian, Continental Reformed and many Congregational churches.

History

Roots

The Reformed tradition began in the Swiss cities, a few years behind Martin Luther and in partial independence from him. Huldrych Zwingli started preaching straight through the Gospel of Matthew at the Grossmünster in Zurich on 1 January 1519, dropping the set lectionary. In 1523 the city council held public disputations, for which Zwingli drew up his Sixty-Seven Articles, and then sided with him. Over the next two years Zurich removed images, ended the Mass and put a plain service of the word and a memorial Supper in its place (Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 8, “The Swiss Reformation”, secondary).

Two early quarrels set the tradition’s boundaries. Zwingli’s own radical students pushed past him to reject infant baptism, and Zurich answered the first Anabaptists with exile and, in 1527, the drowning of Felix Manz. Then at the Marburg Colloquy (secondary) in 1529, Zwingli and Luther agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and broke on the fifteenth, the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. From then on “Reformed” and Lutheran were two Protestant families. Zwingli died in battle at Kappel in 1531; Heinrich Bullinger succeeded him and led Zurich for over forty years.

Causes

What made a Zurich movement into an international church was Geneva. John Calvin, a French humanist lawyer converted in the early 1530s, published the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 and kept expanding it until the definitive Latin edition of 1559 (CCEL text). Expelled from Geneva in 1538, he spent three years in Strasbourg under Martin Bucer, then returned in 1541 to write the city’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances. These gave the church four offices (pastors, teachers, elders and deacons) and a consistory of pastors and elders to oversee discipline, the seed of presbyterian polity.

Calvin and Bullinger joined the two Swiss centres in the Consensus Tigurinus (secondary) of 1549, a common statement on the sacraments. The Genevan Academy (1559) trained pastors who carried the teaching home, and refugees from France, England, Scotland and the Low Countries did the same.

Spread and confessions

The Reformed never had a single confession like the Lutheran Augsburg Confession. Each national church wrote its own, and the family resemblance among them defines the tradition (Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3, texts). The French churches adopted the Gallican Confession (1559); John Knox led Scotland to the Scots Confession (1560); Guido de Brès wrote the Belgic Confession (1561) for the Low Countries; and in the German Palatinate, Elector Frederick III commissioned the Heidelberg Catechism (1563). Bullinger’s Second Helvetic Confession (1566) won acceptance from Switzerland to Hungary and Poland.

The defining internal crisis came in the Netherlands. Followers of Jacobus Arminius issued the Remonstrance of 1610, arguing that election rests on foreseen faith and that grace can be resisted. The Synod of Dort (1618–1619), with delegates from across Reformed Europe, rejected the Remonstrants in the Canons of Dort. Its five heads of doctrine later became the popular summary of Calvinism.

In Britain, Reformed teaching shaped the early Anglican settlement under Thomas Cranmer and then the Puritan movement that wanted the Church of England reformed further. During the civil war the Westminster Assembly (1643–1653) produced the Westminster Confession of Faith and catechisms, which became the standard for Presbyterians everywhere. Puritans in New England kept the theology but organised as Congregationalists (see Congregational Polity), and English Particular Baptists adapted the same confession in 1689.

Influence

The seventeenth century was the age of Reformed orthodoxy, the scholastic system-building of Francis Turretin in Geneva and John Owen in England (Owen’s works, CCEL). Its signature was covenant (federal) theology, which reads the whole Bible through a covenant of works with Adam and a covenant of grace in Christ.

In the eighteenth century the tradition fed the revivals. Jonathan Edwards, a New England Congregationalist, was both the leading theologian of the Great Awakening and a defender of Calvinist doctrine (Works, vol. 1, CCEL). Reformed revivalism is one of the main sources of modern Evangelical Protestantism.

The nineteenth century produced two strong schools. At Princeton Seminary, Charles Hodge (Systematic Theology, 1872–73, CCEL) and later B. B. Warfield defended confessional Calvinism and a high view of Scripture that later fed into Biblical Inerrancy and the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. In the Netherlands, Abraham Kuyper founded the Free University of Amsterdam (1880), a newspaper and a political party, and became prime minister; with Herman Bavinck he developed a “neo-Calvinism” that claimed every sphere of life for Christ. Kuyper’s 1898 Lectures on Calvinism at Princeton presented Calvinism as a whole worldview. At the same time, Friedrich Schleiermacher, a Reformed pastor in Berlin, launched liberal Protestant theology from inside the same tradition.

In the twentieth century the Swiss theologian Karl Barth rebuilt Reformed theology around God’s self-revelation in Christ and largely drafted the Barmen Declaration (1934), in which the Confessing Church refused Nazi control of the German churches. Through missions the tradition became global: some of the largest Presbyterian churches today are in South Korea, and there are large Reformed churches in Africa, Indonesia and Brazil. The World Communion of Reformed Churches (secondary), formed in 2010 from two older bodies, says its full member churches have about 100 million members. In 2017 it formally associated itself with the Joint Declaration on Justification.

Key ideas and contributors

God’s sovereignty and glory. The Reformed instinct is to begin with God. Calvin opens the Institutes by saying that knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves are bound together, and he treats all of life as lived before God. The Westminster Confession states that God “from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass,” while denying that God is the author of sin (WCF 3.1). This sits within Classical Theism and is what Open Theism most directly rejects; see also Divine Foreknowledge.

Grace and predestination. Salvation is God’s work from first to last: unconditional election, an atonement effective for the elect, grace that regenerates, and the perseverance of the saints (Canons of Dort; Romans 8:29–30, Ephesians 1:3–11). The Reformed share justification by faith alone with Lutherans and emphasise Penal Substitution as the heart of the Atonement. The full position has its own note at Calvinism.

Comfort, not only logic. The Salvation teaching was meant pastorally. The Heidelberg Catechism’s first question asks “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” and answers “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ” (Q&A 1). The catechism then follows the pattern of guilt, grace and gratitude, putting the law in the third part as the shape of a thankful life. This “third use” of the law, as a guide for believers, is a Reformed emphasis.

Scripture over tradition, even in worship. The Reformed hold Sola Scriptura strictly. The Second Helvetic Confession begins with Scripture as “the true Word of God” with “sufficient authority of themselves, not of men” (ch. 1). Many Reformed churches apply this through the regulative principle: public worship should include only what Scripture commands. Hence the plain churches, the removal of images, and in some branches psalm-only singing.

Covenant and sacrament. Covenant theology ties the people of God across both Testaments. Since children were included in the covenant with Abraham, the Reformed baptise the children of believers (Infant Baptism), which is the main point where they part from Baptists who otherwise share their soteriology. On the Lord’s Supper, Calvin moved away from Zwingli’s Memorialism toward a Spiritual Presence: believers truly feed on Christ’s body and blood, but by the Holy Spirit lifting them to Christ in heaven, not by a bodily presence in the elements as in the Lutheran Sacramental Union (Institutes 4.17). See Sacraments.

The church governed by elders. Calvin’s offices became presbyterian government: congregations led by elders, joined in presbyteries, synods and general assemblies, with ministers and lay elders sharing authority. Congregationalists kept the theology but located authority in the local church. See Presbyterian Polity and Church.

All of life under Christ. From Calvin’s Geneva to Kuyper’s Netherlands, the Reformed have tried to shape cities, schools and politics. Kuyper put it in his 1880 inaugural address at the Free University: “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” (Wikiquote, secondary, citing Bratt’s Centennial Reader translation of Sphere Sovereignty). The same impulse produced Puritan New England and Scottish covenanting, and in eschatology it often went with Postmillennialism, though Amillennialism is the more common Reformed view today.

Other contributors: Bucer in Strasbourg, Theodore Beza (Calvin’s successor in Geneva), Zacharias Ursinus (main author of the Heidelberg Catechism), Owen, Edwards, Hodge, Warfield, Kuyper, Bavinck and Barth.

Key controversies

Predestination. The most famous objection is to double predestination: if God chooses some and passes over others, critics ask how God can be loving or just, and how human choice can be real. The Remonstrants raised it at Dort, John Wesley pressed it in the eighteenth century, and Arminianism remains the main Protestant alternative (see the Methodist tradition). Inside the Reformed world the argument has been over how to state the doctrine: supralapsarians and infralapsarians disputed the logical order of God’s decrees, and Barth rewrote election so that Christ is both the electing God and the elected human.

The Lord’s Supper and Christ’s person. The split with Lutherans at Marburg was never only about bread. Lutherans held that Christ’s glorified body can be present wherever the Supper is celebrated; the Reformed insisted that a true human body is in one place and that the eternal Son is never confined to his human nature (the so-called extra Calvinisticum). The Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577) condemned the Reformed view. The two families reached European church fellowship only with the Leuenberg Agreement of 1973, and confessional Lutherans and Reformed outside it still dispute the point.

Church, state and coercion. Reformed cities used civil power for religion. Zurich drowned Anabaptists, and Geneva burned the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus in 1553 with Calvin’s support (Servetus, secondary). Critics from the Anabaptists to modern liberals have treated Geneva as a theocracy. Reformed churches later revised the clauses on the civil magistrate (American Presbyterians amended the Westminster Confession in 1788), but how far the Christian faith should shape public law remains disputed among Reformed people themselves.

Liberalism, Scripture and confessional subscription. In the 1920s American Presbyterians split along fundamentalist and modernist lines. The Auburn Affirmation (1924, secondary) denied that the church could require belief in doctrines such as the inerrancy of Scripture and the virgin birth. J. Gresham Machen, arguing in Christianity and Liberalism (1923) that liberal Protestantism was a different religion, left Princeton to found Westminster Theological Seminary (1929) and then the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936). The question of how strictly officers must subscribe to the confessions runs through every later Presbyterian division, including the founding of the Presbyterian Church in America in 1973. Barth’s view of Scripture as the witness through which God speaks, rather than a text identical with revelation, is still rejected by Reformed inerrantists (see Scripture and Inerrancy, Limited Inerrancy).

Apartheid and the Belhar Confession. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa gave theological support to racial separation. In 1982 the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared that support a heresy, and the Dutch Reformed Mission Church drafted the Belhar Confession (adopted 1986), which confesses the unity of the church, reconciliation and God’s justice. Several churches in North America have since adopted it; others decline to add it to their standards, arguing that it is too tied to one political setting or too open-ended. See Liberation and Justice.

Sexuality and women in office. The mainline-versus-confessional divide now runs mostly along these lines. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opened ordination to people in same-sex relationships in 2011 and changed its definition of marriage in 2015 (source (secondary)), which prompted congregations to leave for bodies such as ECO and the PCA. The Christian Reformed Church moved the other way: its 2022 synod declared that its confessions already exclude homosexual sex (unverified wording), and dissenting congregations have since left. The same churches divide over women elders and ministers: the PC(USA) and most European Reformed churches ordain women, while the PCA and OPC hold a complementarian view. See Affirming Theology, Traditional Marriage Ethic and Women in Ministry.

Justification and covenant again. Within conservative Presbyterianism, the Federal Vision (secondary) movement of the early 2000s stressed baptism and covenant membership, and drew on the New Perspective on Paul. Critics charged that it blurred justification by faith alone; a PCA study committee reported to the 2007 general assembly that its views conflict with the Westminster Standards (source (secondary)). The same years saw the “New Calvinism” among younger evangelicals and Baptists, who took up Reformed soteriology without infant baptism or presbyterian government, raising the old question of whether Calvinism is the whole Reformed tradition or only one part of it. Related debates over faith and works appear under Lordship Salvation.

What remains unresolved

Reformed churches share a recognisable starting point: Scripture as final authority, God’s sovereign grace, covenant and an ordered church. They do not share a single institution or confession, and that has made the tradition both durable and prone to division. The live questions are whether confessional standards written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries still bind, how strictly, and who decides when a church has moved outside them.