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Abstract
The Impact of Luther's Reformation on the development of Church Law in the Netherlands. This essay describes how essential the specific history of the reformation in the Netherlands was for the developments of reformed church law in that country. The Dutch reformation was relatively late and was more Calvinistic than Lutheran. Calvin's model of structuring the church, the essential effect of the refugee situation of many reformed believers and the fact that the revolt as well as the reformation were movements mainly ,from below', result in a church polity with the following characteristics: self-government of each individual congregation, active involvement of all church members, independence towards political authorities and a presbyterial-synodical church organisation. This church model was reached through a series of synodical meetings that started in the 1560ies and came to a conclusion at the Synod of Dordt in 1618/1619.

A meta-theory was developed that brought together implicit premises or world views that constantly re-surface in human thought. Although these elements, which are often referred to as being the result of differences in human 'temperament', have long been part of the scholarly activity of humankind, a comprehensive synthesis has been lacking so far. In order to redress this shortcoming, an integrated perspective, supported by scholarly evidence, regarding basic characteristics of making sense of life and world was introduced. As a result, four paradigmatic or root intellectual orientations (designated as type I, type II, type III and type IV) have been identified. The theory was found to be applicable across a wide range of scholarly disciplines and cultures. In the present case the field of political thought is surveyed. Four basic paradigms in the literature on political thought are briefly described in terms of an example of each meta-type, namely: the objectivist-empyrean, e.g., Plato (type I), the objectivist-empiricist, e.g., Aristotle (type II), the subjectivist-empiricist, e.g., Rousseau (type III), and the subjectivist-empyrean, e.g., Marx (type IV). DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p2352