Sunday, March 15, 2009

Calvinism is back?

Time identifies some trends in "10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now." Such prognostications often have a very short shelf-life. Interestingly, number 3 on the list is "The New Calvinism." From the article [I added the links]:
If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The Old Rugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared 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 we are...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You are heaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity."....

Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation's other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don't have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by "glorifying" him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards invested Calvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken in the U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with human will. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism's loss of appetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzy Jesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operates as a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches.

No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom's hottest links. .... [more]
Driscoll comments on the article here and here and here. "While the article inaccurately painted God as essentially the author of evil, the fact that Reformed theology has gotten so big that it merits this kind of attention is nothing short of shocking." Time, of course, is far less important than it once was, nevertheless....

3. The New Calvinism - 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now - TIME

3 comments:

  1. Jim,

    What is your take on Driscoll? Hope all is well. Reformed Theology never went away. I think people are just realizing their depravity in a more real way. Thank you Holy Spirit!

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  2. I like what Driscoll says and writes. I doubt that I would be happy in his church....

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  3. Expanding on that: if Keller were only a Baptist, I think I might be very happy in his congregation. And I like what I read about Dever very much.

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