Throughout this post I’ve been putting “Calvinism” in quotation marks. By that I mean to signal that the idea that we can accurately summarize Calvinism with the acronym TULIP is highly problematic. As Richard Muller has noted for years, e.g., in this 2009 essay, the meaning of “Calvinism” is varied and even fluid. Calvinism might mean: What Calvin himself taught in his own lifetime; What his proximate followers taught; What his seventeenth-century successors taught; Anyone who affirms predestination (as it is often used today).
Just when one might have thought that the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement(s) might be waning—they aren’t getting any younger—comes a piece in last Friday’sNew York Times by Mark Oppenheimer on the Calvinist revival among evangelicals. Of course it begins with TULIP and moves on to the largely political, sociological, and theological controversies over the place of “Calvinism” in the Southern Baptist Convention. Happily, Oppenheimer talked with Mark Dever, pastor of Capital Hill Baptist Church.
Given that it is apparently impossible for the media to find Reformed confessionalists who share Calvin’s ecclesiology, view of the sacraments, hermeneutics, and understanding of the history of redemption (Brian Lee, pastor of Christ Reformed Church is also in DC but his is not a large congregation embroiled in a heated controversy within a 16-million-member denomination) it is well that Oppenheimer chose to talk to Mark. He’s an excellent scholar of the Reformed tradition and, with Kevin DeYoung, one of the better representatives of the YRR movement.
The meat of the story is the apparent growth of the influence of “Calvinism” within the SBC. Oppenheimer notes the state of Dever’s congregation when he got there and its present flourishing. He also interviews Roger Olson, prince of the narrative of perpetual victimhood, who, instead of celebrating diversity within the SBC and the contribution that “Calvinism” makes to the SBC, suggests that the Calvinists in the SBC have gained their foothold through deception. That’s ironic since there is solid evidence that Arminius, ostensibly the first victim of the evil Calvinists, survived as long as he did by dissembling.
It is encouraging that Oppenheimer interviewed a parishioner from Mark’s congregation, who reports that Mark is faithful expositor of the Word and that is the chief reason for the transformation of the congregation.
The most bizarre part of the story must be the interview with Serene Jones, President of Union Theological Seminary, to whom Oppenheimer talked to gauge the reaction by the liberal mainline churches to the rise of the YRR movement. She asserts that the mainliners, who reject Calvin’s view of Scripture, God, Christ, salvation, the church (especially discipline), sacraments, and eschatology but who otherwise are right with him, claims that, for Calvin, “civic engagement” is the “main form” of obedience to God. Assuming that Oppenheimer got the quote right then we might think that Jones is unaware of Calvin’s doctrine of the “twofold government.”
The really bizarre part, however, is her claim that Calvin not only misquoted Scripture, which may well have happened, but that “he often makes up Scripture passages that don’t exist.” Again, we’re dependent upon Oppenheimer’s reporting and we should remember that Jones is a published Calvin scholar but this one is a puzzler. It is true that sixteenth-century authors did paraphrase Scripture rather freely sometimes but so do we. I’m happy to be instructed but I’ve not seen Calvin fabricating Scripture.
Throughout this post I’ve been putting “Calvinism” in quotation marks. By that I mean to signal that the idea that we can accurately summarize Calvinism with the acronym TULIP is highly problematic. As Richard Muller has noted for years, e.g., in this 2009 essay, the meaning of “Calvinism” is varied and even fluid. Calvinism might mean,
- What Calvin himself taught in his own lifetime
- What his proximate followers taught
- What his seventeenth-century successors taught
- Anyone who affirms predestination (as it is often used today)
[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]