(is that too bold of me, sorry!)

Meg

Is “Calvinism” too particular of a label, though? It seems to be one particular strand within the larger theological framework of the Reformed tradition, and the tendency to equate the two is too prolific.

But I’m agreed with Meg. I’ve heard a lot of *why* theology is important, but very little actual theology. Until we get to the actual teaching of it, it’s still just “practical” theology.

Emily, I hope you stick around through the rest of my posts about Calvinism. I would “listen to” most of the men you listed (maybe not Finney) but that doesn’t mean they are right about Calvinism.

You say that Calvinism causes divisions in the church. But Arminius and Finney both were the ones who caused divisions. The doctrines of grace were established before they started to oppose it.

Then there’s the neo-Calvinism of the later Nineteenth Cenury launched by Abraham Kuyper which shifts from a Dordtian emphasis on the doctrines of grace with the non-elect elected to Hell, shifts as I say to another forward-edge emphasis on “redeemed in all spheres of life” – which became a constuctve ideology for Christian organization in all spheres of life, the church being only one instituitonalization of the fulsome Body of Christ in every sphere.

Then came the update on Kuyper, taking an outright philsophical form in the mid-Twentieth Century, by Herman Dooyeweerd and D H Th Vollenhoven – which can be called a neo-neo-Calvinism. But the followers of which eventaully changed the name of their association in the 1980s to “the Association for Reformational Philosophy.”

And now there’s people like me who could possibly be called collectively a neo-neo-neo-Calvinism – but we’re too hitorically conscious to want to carry the baggage of a guy at the end of his reign as theocrat in Geneva who gave the Gospel over to magistrates to burn Michael Servetus to death in the public square. No doubt, Servetus should have been jailed, tried, and then ultimately banished. But Calvin had already sworn when the Catholics had Servetus in jail in another jurisdiction, that they should exterminate and, if not, Calvin said he hoped himself to get his hands on Servetus to roast him up right.

In other words, the old guy went stark raving mad with theocratic hubris. That’s what an open form of the Twenty First century – not rigged to protect C’s earlier achievements and writings (among which I find much of real value still) as nearly divine artifacts – would go to immediately to asses our legacy of a Calvin who greenlit the way in the name of Christ for the magistrates of Geneva to proceed to burn Servetus alive. How gracoius!, if I may ironize a moment.

I shudder when I see groups reprise the name “Calvinism.” I’m no pacifist, but it’s difficult to see why we’d want to carry the baggage of Calvin’s name as our own identifier. But, there’s another side of the man’s life that is best preented in William Bouwsma’s John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait. There are things you can admire about the man, and achievements you can hold onto with good faith. But sticking that name on your own forehead? It’s not for me.

Yours, Anaximaximum