As many of you know, I've been a Calvinist from the start. I'll never forget the time I preached on TULIP at Coastlands and freaked a lot of people out. I enjoyed this article and thought it was worth the post. I'd love to hear your comments.
The New Calvinism
By DAVID VAN BIEMA
If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity,track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The OldRugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could haveshared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of "Shine, Jesus, Shine." And today,more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while weare...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You areheaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity."
Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th centuryreply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses isEvangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereignand micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination'slogical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn,God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequenthuman action or decision.
Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation's other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bitless dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity whoorchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or homeforeclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don't have tosecond-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by"glorifying" him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards investedCalvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken inthe U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with humanwill. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church(U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism's loss ofappetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzyJesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operatesas a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches.
No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a RickWarren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at ChristianityToday, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in theEvangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper ofMinneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head ofthe Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. TheCalvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, andReformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom'shottest links.
Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures forthe movement's doctrinal drift, but can't offer the same blanketassurance. "A lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness,divorce, drugs or sexual temptation," says Collin Hansen, author of Young,Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists. "Theyhave plenty of friends: what they need is a God." Mohler says, "The momentsomeone begins to define God's [being or actions] biblically, that personis drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist."Of course, that presumption of inevitability has drawn accusations ofarrogance and divisiveness since Calvin's time. Indeed, some of today'senthusiasts imply that non-Calvinists may actually not be Christians.Skirmishes among the Southern Baptists (who have a competing non-Calvinistcamp) and online "flame wars" bode badly.
Calvin's 500th birthday will be this July. It will be interesting to seewhether Calvin's latest legacy will be classic Protestant backbiting orwhether, during these hard times, more Christians searching for securitywill submit their wills to the austerely demanding God of their country'sinfancy.
