Why should Catholics read a book about Calvinists? One good reason: Catholics probably invented the name. During the aggro of the Reformation, a useful rhetorical strategy for papal loyalists was to tag the various reform movements in the Western Church with the names of leading personalities within them: the implication being that these groups were no better than fads, personality cults. That gave us such loaded terms as Zwinglian, Lutheran, Calvinist. It worked both ways, of course, so among several variants on “pope-lover” thought up then, “papist” has survived into our own age, complete with its original sneery edge which, on the whole, the word “Calvinist” has lost. Yet this name is still problematic. Perhaps “Calvinism” was a catchy title forced on Darryl Hart by his publishers: as a good historian, he is perfectly aware that it is an inadequate description for the family of Christian Churches now spread across the world. Calvin didn’t invent these Churches, and as late as the nineteenth century, they regarded him as just one leading theologian among several sixteenth-century Reformers. Their chosen self-description was simply “Reformed”.
