Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics

Calvin and the foundations of modern politics, a briliant analysis of Calvin's thoughts. Along with a comment on VoeglinView.

• The tendency of Calvin’s thought to ally a rigorous unworldliness with a certain thoroughgoing commitment to practical concerns.
• Calvin radically distinguishes the divine and the human, the spiritual and the temporal precisely for the purpose of joining them together more powerfully than ever before.
• Calvin opposes the spiritual kingdom and the political kingdom in order to wage a two-front war against the kingdom in the human breast—against the rational soul. When the soul is excluded, along with all “intermediate things,” it is possible completely to unite divine activity and human activity. Since Hegel, at least, we have called this union History.
• On the basis of the fundamental Protestant belief in justification by faith alone, Calvin radically severs the human and divine realms in order to make possible their fusion in historical activity.