From Protestant to Reformed

Abstract

This chapter discusses the Reformed (or Calvinist) tradition. The Reformed tradition (or, alternatively, “Calvinism”) played a singular role in the making of the Reformation in England, Ireland, and Scotland and the development of New England. As early as the 1530s, Luther's theology, although available in translation, was giving way to connections direct and indirect with the Reformed international, connections nurtured by Thomas Cranmer, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533. The chapter then looks at how the Reformed tradition was conveyed to British Protestants through books such as John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563 in English) and first-hand encounters with Reformed practice that happened in the 1550s during the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–58), when English and Scottish ministers—the “Marian exiles”—fled to the Continent. As Foxe and the martyrs whose faith he was documenting repeatedly declared, Catholicism was wrong because it was based on “human inventions” whereas their version of Christianity was restoring the “primitive” perfection of the apostolic church. The chapter also outlines how the Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in England.