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John Calvin developed arresting new teachings on rights and liberties, church and state, and religion and politics that shaped the law of Protestant lands. Calvin's original teachings were periodically challenged by major crises - the French Wars of Religion, Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War, American colonization, and American Revolution. In each such crisis moment, a major Calvinist figure emerged - Theodore Beza, Johannes Althusius, John Milton, John Winthrop, John Adams, and others - who modernized Calvin's teachings and translated them into dramatic new legal and political reforms. This rendered early modern Calvinism one of the driving engines of Western constitutionalism. A number of basic Western laws on religious and political rights, social and confessional pluralism, federalism and constitutionalism, and more owe a great deal to this religious movement. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of history, law, religion, politics, ethics, human rights, and the Protestant Reformation.
- Sales Rank: #1261803 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cambridge University Press
- Published on: 2008-02-04
- Released on: 2008-01-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.74" h x .83" w x 5.98" l, 1.40 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 406 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"John Witte's new book...will be illuminating to intellectual historians and constitutionalists, but also accessible to educated readers with an interest in the relation of religious thought to ideas of freedom."
Michael McConnell, Stanford University, Books and Culture, Feb. 2009.
"Altogether, this is an ambitious, sweeping, and synthetic undertaking...Witte makes a strong case for the primacy of religious texts and traditions in the advance of human rights."
Raymond Mentzer, University of Iowa, Religious Studies Review, December 2009.
'Historians, not to mention philosophers and theologians, have too long overlooked the Calvinist contribution to the human rights tradition. John Witte's superlative study definitively corrects that shortcoming and thereby makes an indispensable contribution to our changing understanding of that tradition.' David Little, Harvard Divinity School
'John Witte has written a magistral survey of ideas about law, religion and human rights as developed by John Calvin in sixteenth-century Geneva and then developed and adapted by selected intellectual descendants of his in France, the Netherlands, England, and colonial America. These ideas are analyzed with all the clarity and bite one expects of a great historian of thought. They should make a useful and thought-provoking contribution to modern attempts to cope with concepts that are still of fundamental importance.' Robert M. Kingdon, University of Wisconsin, Madison
'The Reformation of Rights will come as a revelatory jolt to those who embrace the standard history of natural rights, which holds that the idea of such rights was introduced into Western thought by the political philosophers of the Enlightenment. Witte's argument, developed with meticulous attention to the sources, and always judicious in its conclusions, is that centuries before the Enlightenment, Calvinists were arguing for natural rights, especially natural religious rights: freedom of conscience, freedom of exercise, freedom of the church. The Reformation of Rights is a magisterial contribution to a new narrative of rights.' Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University
'Witte's [The] Reformation of Rights is ... [a] cohesive and ambitious book. ... Amid the growing number of recent books about the history of religious coexistence in early modern Europe, this one should not be overlooked.' Journal of Ecclesiastical History
'... essential reading for scholars and students of history, law, religion and politics, ethics and human rights, and the Reformation.' Journal of Reformed Theology
About the Author
John Witte, Jr is Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. His many publications include Law and Protestantism (2002).
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Book Says Human Rights Should Consider Religion
By Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University
Despite the Golden Rule, religious leaders and human rights activists are not always close allies -- but they should be, according to Emory University legal historian John Witte, Jr. in his new book, The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge University Press).
"To ignore religious rights is to overlook the conceptual and historical source of many other individual and group rights. They are a neglected part of the human rights tradition," said Witte, Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and director of Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR).
Human rights proponents, says Witte, tend to believe that religion should not play a large role in the quest to establish rights common to all. They argue that the sacred texts have more to say about commandments and obligations than liberties and freedoms, and that religions themselves have perpetuated as much inequality and violence as they have cultivated peace and justice.
Likewise, many in the religious world are hesitant to fully embrace a theological discourse of human rights, finding this emphasis on secular liberties and religious pluralism in tension with their emphasis on divine law and on the need for structure and orthodoxy.
Both tend to credit the concept of human rights to the political philosophy of the Western Enlightenment, which celebrated reason over revelation, democracy over monarchy, and personal autonomy over communal responsibility.
But Witte explains in his new book, a product of the CSLR's Christian Legal Studies Project, that this is false assumption, that the seeds of modern human rights were cast centuries before, including when the 16th-century Genevan reformer John Calvin developed new teachings on religious freedom.
"There were many human rights in place before there were modern democratic revolutions fought in their name," he said. "Indeed, it is now quite clear that the Enlightenment was not so much a wellspring of Western rights as a watershed in a long stream of rights thinking that began more than a millennium before."
The religious rights developed by early Calvinists became the "midwife" of many other constitutional rights, he says. Early modern Calvinists became ardent champions of the rights of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness; of democratic election and representation; of political dissent and civil resistance; and of freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly. They also championed group rights, especially those of the church, family, and school--institutions they considered essential to maintaining faith and order and to buffering the state's tendency toward tyranny.
In his own writings, Calvin called for protection of "the common rights of mankind." He saw it as the state's responsibility to enforce civic norms and the church's responsibility to teach spiritual norms, and urged a democratic process of elections and respect for liberty within the church. "These principles allowed the church to strike a perpetual balance between law and liberty, structure and spirit, order and innovation," writes Witte.
After Calvin's death, leading Calvinist thinkers, writers, jurists, and philosophers adapted and advanced this reformation of rights. Instead of a comprehensive survey of Calvinist teachings about law, religion, and human rights, Witte chose to concentrate on "those figures who stood tallest in times of crisis and challenge" and "permanently redirected the Calvinist tradition toward a ever wider embrace of rights."
The Reformation of Rights tells of the foundations for rights that Calvin built through his work in 16th century Geneva; the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 in France and the decisive response of Calvin's successor Theodore Beza; the Dutch Revolt against the King of Spain in the late 1500s to the early 1600s (which foreshadowed the American Revolution some two hundred years before its time) and the reaction of Calvinist jurist Johannes Althusius in crafting a comprehensive theory of law, religion, and human rights; the Puritan Revolution from 1640 to 1660 against the tyranny of King Charles and the remarkable theory of religious, domestic, and civil liberty developed by John Milton; and the challenges facing the New England Puritans as they struggled to create a system of "ordered liberty" within church, state, and society.
"To tell this historical story of rights in early modern Calvinism is not to wax nostalgic about a purported golden age of human rights, nor is it to suggest that all the particular rights premises and precepts of early modern Calvinists be accepted in our day--by contemporary Calvinists, let alone by everyone else," Witte writes ". . . it is instead to point to a rich understanding of rights that is too little known and too little used today, even by many Protestant insiders."
Of course, Witte admits, like many other religions, governments, and institutions, Calvinism has had its own deep flaws and fissures, sometimes acting in the same oppressive, intolerant way it decried in others. "When Calvinists were in the minority, they were proponents of human rights, and when they were in the majority, they sometimes had the luxury of forgetting about the rights of others," he says. "They could take as well as give."
The quest for human rights has been a universal one, he adds, from classical Rome to early modern Calvinism to today. The challenge of the next century will be to transform religious communities from the "midwives" to the "mothers" of human rights, he says, asking them to give birth to their own unique human rights norms and practices.
"In part," Witte writes, "this is a return to prophetic voices of dissent, long purged from traditional religious canons, but, in retrospect, prescient of some of the rights roles that the tradition might play today."
* * *
The Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University is home to world-class scholars and forums on the religious foundations of law, politics, and society. It offers first-rank expertise on how the teachings and practices of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have shaped and can continue to transform the fundamental ideas and institutions of our public and private lives. The scholarship of CSLR faculty provides the latest perspectives, while its conferences and public forums foster reasoned and robust public debate.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A little too pro-Calvinist, but a necessary corrective for Straussians
By Douglas H. Walker
"The Reformation of Rights" is a concise but thorough summary of early modern (1500s to 1700s) Calvinist teachings on civil rights, political rights, resistance theory, the proper relationship between church and state, and religious liberty. He surveys five thinkers (or sets of thinkers): John Calvin, Theodore Beza, Johannes Althusius, John Milton, and the American Puritans. Aside from John Milton, these people are broadly representative of the state of thinking about politics among Calvinists of their time. The primary contribution Witte makes is to emphasize the role Calvinism played in the emergence of liberty and human rights in the West. Contrary to conventional thinking (especially as represented by the followers of American political theorist Leo Strauss, aka "Straussians"), which views the spread of rights as a product of the secular Enlightenment, Witte shows that sincerely religious people played a major role in the rise of civil liberty and religious toleration. Calvinists during this period believed in a formal separation of the offices of church and state, although they shared the same purpose and cooperated significantly. Calvinists supported criminal rights, opposed absolute government, and even endorsed "popular sovereignty" (the idea that all power comes from the consent of the citizens). Over time, their views on religious liberty became more and more tolerant, until by the mid-1700s they supported full liberty of conscience. Witte is a good writer, adept at summarizing the material but including enough direct quotations to get the feel of the original writers. This is a not an overall discussion of political theory, and one particularly unfortunate omission is any discussion of Johannes Althusius's contribution to the theory of federalism. The book stays true to its stated focus of "law, religion, and human rights".
My primary complaint about this book is that Witte (a Calvinist himself) downplays the many ways in which Calvinists differed from modern Westerners about rights. He emphasizes the ways in which Calvinists foreshadowed the American Constitution and modernity generally, but does not address the differences. The American Constitution is the product of the Enlightenment as well as other religious traditions. Religious toleration in particular owes more to dissenting Protestants (Baptists, Anabaptists, Quakers, etc.) than it does to Magisterial Protestants (Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, etc.). A good book about the dissenting Protestant contribution to religious liberty is Nicholas Miller's "The Religious Roots of the First Amendment". Even John Milton, the only figure in the book who truly embraced separation of church and state, was not really a Calvinist (he rejected Calvin's interpretation of predestination and free will, and was an Arian). And the later Puritans were heavily influenced by John Locke and other non-Calvinist thinkers, a fact Witte ignores. Their greater openness to religious liberty may have been a product of Enlightenment influence. Including John Adams as a Calvinist is especially strange given his antipathy to much of traditional Calvinist doctrine.
Still, overall, this book gets 4 stars and a positive rating from me because it accomplishes what it sets out to do. It introduces the reader to the Calvinist tradition's interaction with politics, law, human rights, and religious liberty. This is an underdeveloped topic that deserves to be reconsidered. This book is a healthy addition to growing number of publications debunking the claim that religion and freedom were/are at odds with each other, or that religious people almost always opposed moral or political progress. Straussians take note!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
good book
By Shaftesbury
This book is an interesting and incisive discussion of Calvinist theology and the development of human rights law. The argument is whiggish and Witte never really defines Calvinism in any meaningful way...just how "Calvinist" was Milton and the American colonists is open to debate. I would however recommend this book to anyone interested in early modern constitutionalism. It's smart, well written, and illuminating. I would read this book alongside Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols) and Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform.
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