Both Wahhabism and Calvinist Protestantism sought to return to the original message of their religion, as understood by the earliest generations (i.e., early Church, Salaf).
Both movements rejected additional teachings which had accumulated by the late medieval period, arguing that these often amounted to polytheism and idolatry.
Both movements also prioritized militant rebellion and literal warfare on coreligionists.
Both movements are attacked by critics for having a flawed understanding of the earliest generations (e.g., Christians dispute the Calvinist understanding of the early Church, Muslims dispute the Wahhabi understanding of the Salaf).
RELATED: Wahhabism Is the Inversion of Ahl al-Hadith
The following passage can be found in Carlos Eire, War against Idols (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 1-3.
IN 1509, when John Calvin was born, Western Christendom still shared a common religion of immanence. Heaven was never too far from earth. The sacred was diffused in the profane, the spiritual in the material. Divine power, embodied in the Church and its sacraments, reached down through innumerable points of contact to make itself felt: to forgive or punish, to protect against the ravages of nature, to heal, to soothe, and to work all sorts of wonders. Priests could absolve adulterers and murderers, or bless fields and cattle.
During their lives, saints could prevent lightning from striking, restore sight to the blind, or preach to birds and fish. Unencumbered by the limitations of time and space, they could do even more through their images and relics after death. A pious glance at a statue of St. Christopher in the morning ensured protection from illness and death throughout the day. Burial in the habit of St. Francis improved the prospects for the afterlife. A pilgrimage to Santiago, where the body of the apostle James had been deposited by angels, or to Canterbury, where St. Thomas a Becket had had his skull split open by knights of King Henry II, could make a lame man walk, or hasten a soul’s release from purgatory.
The map of Europe bristled with holy places; life pulsated with the expectation of the miraculous. In the popular mind and in much of the official teaching of the Church, almost anything was possible. One could even eat the flesh of the risen Christ in a consecrated wafer.
Fourteen years later, as Calvin began his studies at the University of Paris, it was no longer possible to take this intermingling of spiritual and material for granted. Among the many changes brought about by the Reformation, none was more visible, or tangible, where it triumphed, than the abolition of this kind of religion.
Although a sharp critique of medieval piety spearheaded by the great humanist Erasmus had begun to capture hearts and minds in learned circles since the early years of the century, the impact of this critique was limited by its appeal to a rather narrow audience, and also by the fact that it considered such piety only as something improper, not false or damnable. In the second decade of the sixteenth century, however, medieval Catholic piety suddenly began to be attacked in some places as “idolatry,” or false religion. Wherever those who held these views acquired enough power, churches were sacked, images smashed and burned, relics destroyed, sanctuaries desecrated, altars overturned, and consecrated hosts fed to dogs and goats.
The religion of immanence was replaced by the religion of transcendence; Reformers and their congregations exulted in the beauty of a newly stripped, whitewashed cathedral. The “half-hearted” critique of the humanists was left smoldering among the ashes with the images. Even Erasmus, the great critic, left Basel when the images had all been burned. As the nature of the sacred was redefined, and one holy place after another vanished from the map, first in Germany and Switzerland, later in France, the Netherlands, and England, the unity of the European religious vision was forever shattered. Within one generation, the image donors had become the image smashers.
But this was not all. While some Protestants cast down the “idols” of Rome, Luther cast out the image breakers from Wittenberg. The redefinition of the sacred, then, became the watershed that separated not only Protestant from Catholic, but Lutheran from Reformed as well. By the time Calvin came to Geneva in 1536, to run his own crusade against “false religion,” the streams of piety were flowing, inalterably, along three different courses. The Catholic stream continued to flow as it had for centuries, suffused with the immanence of the divine. The Lutheran stream, for all its protests, meandered close to these waters. Though they opposed much in medieval piety, Lutherans, for the most part, were not too interested in separating the material from the spiritual, or in promoting a radical change in worship. Stressing instead an opposition to “works-righteousness,” they steered a middle course between transcendence and immanence, and remained open to the use of material objects in worship as long as they were regarded with indifference.
The Reformed stream flowed hard and fast in a different direction, surging with transcendence. The central focus of Reformed Protestantism was its interpretation of worship – more specifically, of the relationship between the spiritual and the material. The aggressive rejection of the Catholic cult, which became the hallmark of the Reformed tradition, and reached its fullest and most enduring expression in Calvinism, had its foundation in Scripture, but its hermeneutic was determined by certain metaphysical assumptions.
Although the Reformed were every bit as concerned with exegesis and theology as the Lutherans, and also championed the principles of sola fides and sola scriptura, they paid much more attention to the way in which the divine ought to be approached. Stressing the transcendence of God and of the spiritual realm, they adhered to a third principle: “Finitum. non est capax infiniti” (the finite cannot contain the infinite). Guided by this battlecry, the Reformed focused on piety and changed much more in the outward expression of worship than the Lutherans. Aiming to do away with any practice that compromised the “spiritual” worship commanded by God, the Reformed launched a vigorous attack on all external objects of devotion that had previously been charged with religious value. Chief among their targets were the cult of saints, with its images and relics, and the Catholic Mass, with its belief in transsubstantiation and its reverence for the consecrated host. Their posture became uncompromising and disruptive: It led to a crusade against idolatry that manifested itself in iconoclasm, civic unrest, and eventually even in armed resistance against legitimate rulers.
