When immigrant Lutherans came from Germany--fleeing the governmentally enforced "union" of Lutherans and Reformed--they found Pennsylvania Lutherans cooperating with
German Reformed and even with Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists in revivals.
Scholars of religious schisms will not want to miss the author's account of the genesis of the Synod of the Free and Independent
German Reformed Church of Pennsylvania and other bodies formed to rally the faithful around patterns of culture, as much as (or even more than) around theological issues.
These texts--from the German Evangelical,
German Reformed, Christian (e.g.
In the American Revolution, "the second Puritanism," the champions of republicanism were chiefly Calvinists again--New England's Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Ulster Presbyterians, and Dutch and
German Reformed, with some support from "low church" Anglicans.
Rohls first traces the development of the Old Reformed confessional writings, beginning with Zwingli and German-speaking Switzerland, moving on to Calvin and Bullinger and the spread of Calvinism, to Philippism and
German Reformed Theology, the Synod of Dort, English Puritanism, the School of Saumur, and the Helvetic Consensus Formula.
In comparison, the developments within
German Reformed Protestantism are treated somewhat marginally; perhaps because of this, there is only minimal attention to the possibility of influences from the side of Swiss Reformed Protestantism.
In his early days at the little seminary of the
German Reformed Church in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, Schaff, as a high churchman from Berlin, was critical of the individualistic and sectarian character of American religious life, but he became increasingly impressed by its vitality and appreciative of American religious freedom and diversity.
There was, however, an earlier connection between the Dutch congregation and Eraden; this had been forged by the Countess Anna of East Friesland, the leading protector of north
German Reformed Protestantism during the midsixteenth century, who had appointed Lasco superintendant of East Friesland in the early 1540s.
