86 D.G. Hart D.G. Hart, Currently a Visiting Professor of History At

86 book reviews D.G. Hart Calvinism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), xii + 339 pp., us$35.00, isbn 9780300148794. D.G. Hart, currently a visiting professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michi- gan and former director of the Institute of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College, has written an impressive history of what could better be called the Reformed Tradition. The use of the word ‘Calvinism’ creates the same prob- lem that is found in the title of a similar work by the one-time doyen of Calvin scholars in the United States, John T. McNeill in his classic TheHistoryandChar- acter of Calvinism which was published sixty years ago and is still in print. The first Reformed reformers—Bucer, Oecolampadius, Zwingli and Farel—could hardly be called ‘Calvinists’ since Calvin had not yet come to Switzerland when they began their reform movements. Hence it is anachronistic to call these leaders Calvinists. The same is true of many modern Presbyterian-Reformed Christians. Nevertheless, Hart’s book is excellent in many ways. It supersedes McNeill’s book if for no other reason than that it benefits from later studies on Calvin as well as reformation scholarship of the last sixty years. Moreover, it deals with the worldwide spread of the Reformed tradition in Asia and Africa, areas not covered by McNeill. The same is true of Hart’s chapter on “The Con- fessing Church in Germany” and Barth’s role in it (but strangely there is no mention of Bonhoeffer in connection with the Barmen Declaration). A similar lacuna exists in the discussion of Neo-Calvinism in the Netherlands. There is a lengthy discussion of Abraham Kuyper, but no mention of Herman Bavinck! A more serious omission is the failure to note the establishment of the first Reformed seminary in the world, the one in Sarospatak, Hungary in 1521. It was closed by the Russian Communists after World War ii, but reopened in 1991. Other chapters in Calvinism treat the origins of the Reformed Movement in Western Europe and Great Britain with particular attention given to Scotland and the Netherlands, and the spread of the Reformed movement to the New World and Australia. The chapter titled “missionary Zeal” describes the first Reformed Mission Societies and the fruit of their efforts in countries like India, Japan, Indonesia, China and South Africa. Toward the end of the book there is a lengthy chapter about Presbyterians in the United States with the strange title “American Fundamentalists”! Conserva- tive Presbyterians—and not simply the spiritual heirs of J. Gresham Machen— will be surprised at such an appellation. The original fundamentalist-moder- nist conflict in the u.s. in the 1920s involved many traditions of which Reformed Confessionalism was one, but it is hardly apt to describe those conservative Presbyterians then or now as fundamentalists. Here one should consult the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/15697312-00901007 book reviews 87 excellent study by George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism 1870–1925. This chapter is also not up to date, for it does not treat the current plight of the Presbyterian Church usa and the growth of splinter Presbyterian groups like the Presby- terian Church in America (pca) which boasts one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in the United States, Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, led by its gifted and nationally recognized pastor, Timothy Keller. The same could be said of the Netherlands, where Hart fails to note that the two major Reformed denominations have united with the Lutheran Church to form the Protestant Church in the Netherlands. On the other hand, in his conclud- ing chapter Hart describes the organization of a new Reformed Congregation in Heidelberg in 2010 which is subsidized by a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America. A special interest of Hart is church-state relations. He frequently points out that ‘Calvinism’ flourishes best when it is freed from its dependence on, and subjection to, national powers. Speaking of the worldwide spread of Reformed Protestantism Hart concludes: For all of the Reformed churches’ dependence on colonialism and migra- tion, they had by the end of the nineteenth century gone from being one of Europe’s confessional churches to a global faith that included the uneasy mix of state churches in Europe, denominations with direct ties to the West, and indigenous churches that were developing an ethos indepen- dent of European assumptions. 204 One review suggests that Hart sounds “almost cheerful about Calvinism’s global presence.” However, I do not find in this book a triumphalist approach to the history of Calvinism. To the contrary, he rather minimizes its social, cul- tural and political influences. He concludes his book with the dubious state- ment, “Even if it is not responsible for the blessings of democracy, liberty, and prosperity, in its own way Calvinism’s history qualifies as remarkable” (204). On the whole, however, Hart’s judgments are balanced and fair, but occa- sionally he errs, for example, in calling Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth “Neo- Orthodox” and also in relying on a Time magazine claim that Barth has “far fewer disciples in the u.s. than either Niebuhr or Tillich” (291). That may have been true in 1962, but it is certainly not the case today. Despite the various caveats I have noted along the way, I would still recom- mend this book highly. It is comprehensive, generally up to date, very readable Journal of Reformed Theology 9 (2015) 79–111.

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