Reading for Week 3

Religious visions: ecclesiology, political theology and the Millenium

From one end of Europe to another, from presbyterian Scotland to Tridentine Italy, the Reformation and the reactions to it involved an explosion of religious creativity. This process strongly influenced people's views of history and politics, leading many to seek to re-model government and society along radically different lines. Jean Calvin, whose theological ideas inspired a major Protestant movement, offered the most distinctive vision of a new human order, which the citizens of Geneva actually tried to turn into reality. Many others believed that the millenial reign of King Jesus was imminent, that the apocalyptic end of the world was nigh, contributing greatly to the revolutionary mood and political tensions which shaped later sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Europe.

Set texts

• Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion [Bk IV, cap. 20, sects 22-32]
• John Napier of Merchiston, A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St John ['To the Godly and Christian Reader']

Other reading

• Harro Höpfl, The Christian Polity of Jean Calvin (1982)
• R.M. Kingdom and R.D. Linder, Calvin and Calvinism: A Source of Democracy? (1970)
• R.C. Gamble, Calvin's Theology (1992)
• Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (1966)
• R. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (1978)
• A.H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (1979)
• The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (1984)
• Mark Napier, Memoirs of John Napier of Merchiston (1834)
• A.H. Williamson, 'Number and National Consciousness', in Roger A. Mason, (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (1994)

Web resources

• John Napier