On Calvinism

Few words in theology carry more freight, or invite more caricature, than Calvinism. To some it names a tulip-shaped syllogism about who can be saved; to others, the whole granite edifice of Reformed Christianity. The truth is larger than the first and more particular than the second.

The man and the tradition

John Calvin (1509–1564) was a French humanist lawyer turned reformer, the great systematizer of the second generation of the Reformation. His Institutes of the Christian Religion — a slim catechetical handbook in 1536, a four-book summa by 1559 — gave Protestant theology its most enduring architecture. But the tradition that bears his name was never his alone. Zwingli and Bullinger in Zürich, Bucer in Strasbourg, Knox in Scotland, and a host of others built what is more properly called the Reformed tradition, of which Calvin is the most famous voice.

At its center is not predestination but the majesty of God: the conviction that salvation, from first to last, is God's gracious work, and that nothing — worship, church order, the conscience of princes — stands outside his sovereignty.

Where the five points came from

The famous "five points" were not Calvin's outline but a rebuttal. In 1610 the followers of Jacobus Arminius issued a five-article Remonstrance qualifying the Reformed doctrines of election and grace. The Synod of Dort (1618–19) — an international assembly that included delegates of the Church of England — answered point for point: total depravity, unconditional election, definite (or "limited") atonement, effectual grace, and the perseverance of the saints. The TULIP acronym itself is a much later mnemonic, an English-language convenience of the twentieth century, and Reformed divines have grumbled about its adequacy ever since.

The English reception

The Church of England drank from the Reformed stream, but through her own cup. Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles treats predestination and election with striking pastoral care — the doctrine is "full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons," and dangerous only when made a subject of curious speculation. Archbishop Whitgift's more sharply Calvinist Lambeth Articles of 1595 never obtained authority; the milder settlement of the Articles and the Prayer Book did. In the seventeenth century the Laudian and Arminian turn pulled the Church another way, and in the eighteenth the old debate flared again between Whitefield's Calvinism and Wesley's Arminianism — a quarrel between friends that neither ever quite won.

The Prayer Book tradition, including the 1928 American book, keeps Cranmer's deep Augustinianism — "we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves" — while declining to resolve on paper what the Articles leave to the mystery of God.

Reading further

The texts behind the debate are the best place to begin: Romans 8 and 9, Ephesians 1, and John 6, all readable in parallel translations at bible.riteandrubric.com. Whatever one concludes about the five points, the Reformed insistence that grace is grace — unearned, prior, and persevering — is simply the old Augustinian faith of the western Church, and the Prayer Book prays it on every page.