The Reformers argued at the time that focus had shifted from the pivotal work that God does for humanity in Jesus Christ to what humanity needs to do for God in Jesus Christ. Still well known today in the Reformer’s response to this shift is that justification comes through trusting in the work of Jesus Christ on the Cross rather than in trusting in human works offered to God through Jesus Christ. But the rejection of free will and the affirmation of grace alone aim at exactly the same point in their theologies: that justification results from God’s work in humans through Jesus Christ rather than from human work.

I picked up John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion some years back. Dipping into it, I anticipated a dry, grim, and doctrinaire treatise. Perhaps because I came to it with such low expectations, the books surprised me. I found the Institutes surprisingly accessible, written by a lively, engaged mind. I anticipated the argument of the books to be tightly wound around the theme of God’s sovereignty—with the focus on God’s glory coming at the expense of humanity’s abasement. Instead, as in Martin Luther’s treatment of predestination, I found that God’s sovereignty and the doctrine of predestination played a manifestly pastoral role in Calvin’s theology. The focus was not on obliterating the human, but rather underscoring God’s great love for his people in rescuing humanity from death, darkness, and despair. The upshot of the doctrine as I read Calvin was “This is a God you can trust.”

Calvinism has become a lightning rod in American religion. The Southern Baptist Convention was recently roiled by a controversy over Calvinism and the blogosphere is full of reports of neo-Calvinists causing turmoil through numerous denominations, including those not traditionally Calvinistic.

Some of the answer certainly derives from misunderstandings of Calvinism. I recall in elementary school my teacher instructing the class that when the Puritans sailed to America on ships, if someone fell off the ship into the water, the others would not attempt to save him, because they believed that God had predestined that person to drown. In trying to save that person from drowning, she said, the Puritans thought they would be opposing God’s will.

No more accurate is the oft-mouthed claim, usually linked with Max Weber, that Calvin taught that worldly riches are a sign of God’s election. I haven’t read enough Puritan theology to know whether they arrive at a colonial-era version of the “health and wealth” gospel, but I know that I did not see it in the Institutes or in any of Calvin’s commentaries I subsequently read.

Part of the answer likely comes from unique threads in Calvinist thought, such as the notion of “double predestination”—the idea that God works symmetrically in predestinating some humans to salvation and others to damnation—and “limited atonement.” Even Lutheranism, which is confessionally predestinarian, followed Augustinian Catholicism as formulated, say, at the Council of Orange, and rejected double predestination and rejected most versions of limited atonement.

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