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AFTER THE REFORMATION: REFORMED POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES – Revolution, again (America, France, etc.)

 The foundations of Reformed political thought were laid in the 16th and 17 centuries, when the passions unleashed by the Reformation were still strong and the outcome of the competition for power among the contending religious forces was still very much in doubt in several places. But by the late 1700’s and, even more, the 1800’s, all this was less and less the case; and in that period Reformed thought and practice began to undergo significant changes. Those Protestants who identified themselves as Reformed still subscribed in principle to much of what their spiritual forebears had said about the relevant topics, but they had to adapt that inheritance to new and different circumstances. So, in politics as in other parts of their lives, they innovated, and some of the changes they made were quite consequential. The purpose of this series of talks is to examine critically several of the more important of those developments and to explore their relevance for current events in the 21st century.