The Flipside of Calvinism

What I Learned from the Calvinists

By David Drury

DruryWriting.com/David

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 Indiana in a few different Wesleyan churches.  But after going to a Wesleyan college I went to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary—which claims to be non-denominational but never claims to be non-ideological.  It is a very Calvinistic school—with nearly (or all) of it’s professors and students espousing a Calvinistic worldview.  I also happen to now live in West Michigan, home of the Christian Reformed Church, the Tulip Time festival, and Calvin College.  There is a very prevalent leaning toward Calvinism around here.  I’m sure that old lawyerly theologian’s bones must be buried around here or something.

 

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 Providence.  I now believe that God is likely in more control of things than my human eyes can see or understand.  I now believe that when I step out to do something I should at least take it slowly and be careful about running ahead of God.  The best of the Calvinists helped me to see my place in a more humble light and to grant to God all the glory.

 

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

 

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© 2006 by David Drury

 

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