The Flipside of Calvinism
What I Learned from the Calvinists
By David Drury
Find part two of this Flipside here:
What I Threw Out
I believe there are almost always two sides to every
coin. I especially enjoy looking at
issues which are usually held as “black and white” issues and then seeing both
sides of that coin. Calvinism is one
such issue. You’ll find people that
think Calvinism is the epitome of all that’s wrong with Christendom… and those
that think John Calvin and his progeny are the only ones that ever got it
right. I land somewhere in between.
I grew up in a decidedly non-Calvinistic surrounding in
Along the way I’ve grown to appreciate a few things about
the Calvinists. There are some things
I’d toss out, for sure, but for starters, here’s what I learned from the
Calvinists:
I learned to love the
art of the sermon. Calvinists tend to have a deeper appreciation
for preaching than many other schools of thought. In seminary I noted how this obsession made
most Calvinists students take the crafting and delivery of a message very
seriously. Growing up under youth
pastors who just “gave a talk” and then “opened the altar” this was a bit new
for me. I realized how amazingly
effective preaching can be when done right from the Bible and crafted in such a
way as to compel people to go to the Bible themselves. The other day I was doing a research project
on John 3:16 and so I went to Calvin Theological Seminary’s library. There they have two entire catalog walls
which note the sermons in the library on every verse in the Bible. I found
over 50 sermons on John 3:16 alone!
The Calvinists love preaching and I learned to love the art of the
sermon from them.
I learned to work for
God’s pleasure. American Calvinists are the spiritual
descendants of the Puritans. If anyone
still has the “Protestant Work Ethic” the Calvinists still have it. They take a holy pride in working for the
Lord, whether it be working on a car, working on a computer, or working with
people. And what’s more there seems to
still be ingrained in many Calvinists this sense of working for God’s pleasure
and not someone else’s. Work is its own
reward, for a good Calvinist. This isn’t
true of them all, but it’s true of a lot of them and I learned to do the same
from the Calvinists. (My parents will
claim I learned this from them—but of course that’s just me learning from the
Calvinist side of them.)
I learned to take God
more seriously. The best Calvinists I’ve met (in seminary,
mostly) had such an amazing reverence and profound amazement at who God is they
couldn’t even express it. The Wholly
Other who is Holy was best introduced to me by Calvinists. I went to a lot of youth camps where Jesus
was treated like a buddy and the Father as the “great Dude in the sky” that I
needed to learn a bit of serious consideration of the majesty of God. Sometimes the Calvinists can start to us a
“Rev. Lovejoy” voice from the Simpsons, a little too fake and showy about their
elaborate conversation with God. I don’t
like that… but more often than not the seriousness with which the Calvinists
have introduced me to God was needed.
The world needs to take God more seriously for sure. I remember one of my professors at
Gordon-Conwell begin to actually cry when he talked about God for a
moment. He couldn’t go on. That sense of awe and worship of the Almighty
stuck with me and I don’t think I learned it before I learned it from the
Calvinists.
I learned that knowing
the Bible is essential. Perhaps the Calvinist obsession
with Preaching is simply birthed from their elevation of the place of
Scripture. The tone of sola scriptura continues to live on in
the Calvinists (even as most of the rest of us poke holes in that line as
theologically viable). It’s all about
the scriptures for a good Calvinist. At one
time I thought studying the Bible meant treating it like a body on an autopsy
table, reducing it to the sum of its parts without acknowledging the Spirit
behind it. But I learned from the
Calvinists that knowing the Bible is essential to every other part of life as a
Christ-follower. They helped me question
the latent anti-intellectualism that I must have picked up somewhere. I learned to love studying the Bible from
them.
I learned that I
should be careful about usurping God’s place. I certainly don’t
want to discount my role in the kingdom or to deflate my own responsibilities
as a follower of Christ, but my own tendency is not to do that. My tendency is to inflate my role, elevate my
position, and increase the self. My
tendency is pride. So the Calvinists
taught me to be careful about usurping God’s place in everything. They helped me to see that some things I
should just leave up to God, and not try to control everything. They loaned me, a diehard Wesleyan, a bit of
a healthy sense of
Those are the best things, among others, that I learned from
the Calvinists. I could go on and on
about how Calvinists taught me to use coupons and other useful things, but
these are perhaps the most central to me now.
I owe a lot to the followers of Calvin.
Thanks to you all for showing me these things. I continue to be influenced positively by
them.
Of course, there are things the Calvinists believe and do that
I don’t want to assimilate. They’re the
things I’m tossing out. Come back next
week for that list.
Find part two of this Flipside here:
What I Threw Out
_________
© 2006 by David Drury
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