An accidental blog

"If God is sovereign, then his lordship must extend over all of life, and it cannot be restricted to the walls of the church or within the Christian orbit." Abraham Kuyper Common Grace 1.1.

Saturday, 9 September 2023

Origin of the term neo-Calvinism pre 1855?

The term neo-Calvinism is becoming more and more popular as this ngram of the number of usages of the term in books in the Google database shows:



 

The earliest known use of the noun neo-Calvinism is in the 1850s according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It suggests that it stems from 1854, in the writing of J. Guthrie.

The reference it gives is J. Guthrie in Evang. Union Worthies

The Revd John Guthrie had died in 1839, so the article is a brief biography of him, not by him as the OED suggests.

I couldn’t find an 1854 version, but the 1883 The Worthies of the Evangelical Union Being the Lives and Labours of Deceased Evangelical Union Ministers; Illustrated with Portraits has this:


 

However, the first mention cannot have been in 1883 as a paper by a Mr Rutherford with the title “Calvinism and Neo-Calvinism, or the Divine intention in the Atonement” is mentioned.

This is from The Evangelical Repository - Volumes 1-2 - Page 106 published in 1855. Presumably by a Mr Guthrie.



This, of course pre-dates Kuyper and how the term is used today. The first mention of the term applying to the approach of Kuyper and Bavinck et al appears to be in an 1887 review of Wilhelm Geesink’s Calvinisten in Holland by by J. Reitsma (George Harinck, “Herman Bavinck and the Neo-Calvinist Concept of the French Revolution,” in  James Eglinton and George Harinck (eds) Neo-Calvinism and French Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 21 fn 43. The term originally had negative connotations, but Anne Anema (1872-1966) used it as a convenient term to describe the movement and the term stuck. (Anne Anema, Calvinisme en rechtswetenschap: een studie (Amsterdam, 1897), p. xvi.)




 

 

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