All of this is to say that the New Calvinism looks a lot like the old New School Presbyterianism with a Baptist and charismatic flair to it. Piper chose not to deal with this issue between the Old and the New just as he neglected the EPC’s stance on women. For now, the coalition is holding together on a Reformed understanding of salvation buttressed by complementarianism and a commitment to inerrancy. Only God, in his sovereign will, knows whether the anchor will hold.

John Piper recently gave a lecture at Westminster Theological Seminary about the New Calvinism that is already getting play at several Reformed sites (see here, here, and here). His aim was to argue for an interrelationship between Old Calvinism and New Calvinism and to attempt to ground the ethnic diversity of the movement in classic Reformed doctrines. If anyone has the stature and force of personality to will a connection between Old and New, it’s John Piper. Nevertheless, the probabilities are that Old Calvinists, who are better understood primarily as Old School Presbyterians, will remain unconvinced even if they think an alliance is the most effective way forward.

Old School Presbyterians had a more strident interpretation of Presbyterianism, complete with Sabbath keeping (no sports or other kinds of activities on the Sabbath) and following the old Reformed Directory of Public Worship. Raised a Missouri Presbyterian, Mark Twain once quipped about sabbath keeping that “we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold” (I imagine there are plenty of good Presbyterians in the northeast and Midwest this winter). On the whole, this reflects mid-nineteenth century Old School ways, not necessarily early twenty-first century. Yet, there remains a concern for proper worship and a distaste for revivalism commensurate with the Old Princeton theologians, Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield. The New School Presbyterians, conversely, were very much in line with revivalism as it unfolded in the nineteenth century and had a looser view about worship as a result.

It is the revivalist style of at least some members of the New Calvinism punctuated by constant references to Jonathan Edwards and the rise of charismatic Calvinism that has many Old School Presbyterians concerned. Piper side-stepped the main issue between the two camps: from an Old-School perspective the New Calvinism smacks of the evangelical revivalism of a D. L. Moody, or, more to the point, the baseball-player-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday (insert Mark Driscoll reference here). Sunday once called the novelist Sinclair Lewis  “Satan’s cohort” in response to Lewis’s 1927 satirical novel Elmer Gantry, whose main character—a hypocritical evangelist—was modeled on Sunday’s flamboyant style.

That older coalition of Congregationalists, Baptists, and New School Presbyterians combined dispensationalism, celebrity revivalism, and fundamentalism—the very traits that Old School Presbyterians disliked then and now. It is not without some irony that Piper acknowledged the important role of Westminster Seminary while not even mentioning that it was the epicenter of Old School Presbyterianism with its anti-revivalist and cessationist stance (at the end of his lecture Piper got a laugh when he said, “you don’t even want to know my eschatology.” Indeed!).

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