Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World: The Influence of Calvin on Five Governments from the 16th Through 18th Centuries

~The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World: The Influence of Calvin on Five Governments from the 16th Through 18th Centuries~ is a thoughtful challenge to conventional Enlightenment historiography. Kelly's book illustrates the influential Protestants roots of ordered liberty in the Western world, particularly in the United States today. The forgotten founding father of America was really John Calvin. Douglas Kelly illustrates how Calvin and Knox inspired the Protestant doctrine of interposition by the lesser magistrates and public officers against the usurpations of absolutists and despots in the higher echelons of power, and on behalf of the people. Some manner of institutionalized corporate resistance is vitally requisite to preserve any free constitution. Douglas Kelly is not alone in his thesis. Also, respected historian Bernard Bailyn accounts for this covenantal influence in American political thought in his acclaimed book 'The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.' Bailyn illustrates the multi-faceted intellectual antecedents animating the American Cause of 1776, which includes the rich covenantal influence that saturated the American colonies. The American War for Independence was derided by its Tory detractors as a Presbyterian Parson's Rebellion and perhaps for good reason. The animating force behind the ideas fueling the colonial resistance was the ideas of John Calvin more so than John Locke. The American colonial charters preceded the birth of Enlightenment thinkers John Locke, John-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu by more than a century. It was an appeal to the customs and conventions of those charters, and their preservation, that compelled the colonial resistance led by James Otis and Samuel Adams to denounce the Tory oppression as unconstitutional.

This book is an excellent survey of the influence of Calvinism in not only Europe but early America as well. It does a wonderful job of capturing the historical as well as theological influence of perhaps the greatest theologian since the Apostles, John Calvin.