Calvinism

Melvyn Bragg and guests Justin Champion, Susan Hardman Moore and Diarmaid MacCulloch discuss the ideas of the religious reformer John Calvin - the theology known as Calvinism, or Reformed Protestantism - and its impact. John Calvin, a Frenchman exiled to Geneva, became a towering figure of the 16th century Reformation of the Christian Church. He achieved this not through charismatic oratory, but through the relentless rigour of his analysis of the Bible. In Geneva, he oversaw an austere, theocratic and sometimes brutal regime. Nonetheless, the explosion of printing made his theology highly mobile. The zeal he instilled in his followers, and the persecution which dogged them, rapidly spread the faith across Europe, and on to the New World in America. One of Calvin’s most striking tenets was ‘predestination’: the idea that, even before the world began, God had already decided which human beings would be damned, and which saved. The hope of being one of the saved gave Calvinists a driving energy which has made their faith a galvanic force in the world, from business to politics. Anxiety about salvation, meanwhile, led to a constant introspection which has left its mark on literature.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Justin Champion 11 episodes
  Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London
• Susan Hardman Moore No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Divinity at the University of Edinburgh
• Diarmaid MacCulloch 11 episodes
  Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford

Related episodes

• Deism
  
  8 Oct, 2020 210 Philosophy and theory of religion
• Wyclif and the Lollards
  
  16 Jun, 2011 270 History of Christianity
• The Pelagian Controversy
  
  21 Apr, 2011 270 History of Christianity
• The Siege of Munster
  
  5 Nov, 2009 270 History of Christianity
• Karl Barth
  
  7 Dec, 2023 230 Christianity
• The Enlightenment in Scotland
  
  5 Dec, 2002 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• John Wesley and Methodism
  
  10 Dec, 2020 270 History of Christianity
• Erasmus
  
  9 Feb, 2012 270 History of Christianity
• Fundamentalism
  
  22 Apr, 1999 200 Religion
• Toleration
  
  20 May, 2004 270 History of Christianity
• Redemption
  
  13 Mar, 2003 230 Christianity
• The Covenanters
  
  12 Mar, 2020 940 History of Europe
• St Paul
  
  28 May, 2009 270 History of Christianity
• George Fox and the Quakers
  
  5 Apr, 2012 270 History of Christianity
• The Trinity
  
  13 Mar, 2014 230 Christianity
• The Rapture
  
  26 Sep, 2019 230 Christianity
• St Thomas Aquinas
  
  17 Sep, 2009 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• The Diet of Worms
  
  12 Oct, 2006 270 History of Christianity
• Witchcraft
  
  21 Oct, 2004 130 Parapsychology and occultism
• Weber’s The Protestant Ethic
  
  27 Mar, 2014 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology

---

Programme ID: b00qvqpz

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qvqpz

Auto-category: 230 (Christian theology)