In the Introduction to this volume, I summarized some of the main Protestant contributions to the development of rights in the Western tradition. Each of the four main branches of the Reformation – Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinist, and Anabaptist – offered distinct teachings on rights in the sixteenth century. Over the next three centuries, their views, separately and together, helped shape the law of Protestant lands in northern Europe and North America. Nicholas Wolterstorff's chapter in this volume analyzes crisply and critically the main schools of Protestant rights talk in the twentieth century before defending his own brilliant new Protestant theory of human rights based on human dignity and moral worth.

In this chapter, I trace one line of Protestant rights development, namely that of the Reformed tradition, and more particularly the Reformed movements influenced by John Calvin. Building in part on classical and Christian prototypes, Calvin developed arresting new teachings on authority and liberty, duties and rights, and church and state that have had an enduring influence on Protestant lands. Calvin's original teachings were periodically challenged by major crises in the West – the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch Revolt, the English Revolution, and the American Revolution. In each such crisis moment, Calvinists modernized Calvin's original teachings and converted them into dramatic new legal and political reforms. This rendered early modern Calvinism one of the driving engines of Western constitutional laws of rights and liberties.