Skip to content ↓

John Piper: 12 Features of the New Calvinism

Last week John Piper spoke at Westminster Seminary, and delivered the seventh annual Gaffin Lecture on “The New Calvinism and the New Community: The Doctrines of Grace and the Meaning of Race” (audio and video). That may not sound like the most exciting lecture you’ve ever listened to, but I found some time to listen in today, and found what Piper began with fascinating (especially in light of last week’s Visual History of the New Calvinism). He began by defining what he means by New Calvinism, and to do that he offered twelve defining features of the movement. He was very careful to stress that these are not things that necessarily separate the New Calvinism from traditional Calvinism or make the new better than the old. Rather, these are simply the markers of the New.

Here then, in brief, are John Piper’s 12 features of the New Calvinism.

1. The New Calvinism, in its allegiance to the inerrancy of the Bible, embraces the biblical truths behind the five points of Calvinism (TULIP), while having an aversion to using the acronym (or any other systematic packaging) along with a sometimes-qualified embrace of Limited Atonement. The focus is on Calvinistic soteriology but not to the exclusion or the appreciation of the broader scope of Calvin’s vision.

2. The New Calvinism embraces the sovereignty of God in salvation and all the affairs of life and history, including evil and suffering.

3. The New Calvinism has a strong complementarian flavor (as opposed to egalitarian) with an emphasis on the flourishing of men and women in relationships where men embrace a call to robust, humble, Christ-like servant-leadership.

4. The New Calvinism leans toward being culture-affirming, as opposed to culture-denying, while holding fast to some very culturally-alien positions on issues like same-sex practice and abortion.

5. The New Calvinism embraces the essential place of the local church: it is led mainly by pastors; it has a vibrant church-planting bent; it produces widely-sung worship music; and it exalts the preached Word as central to the work of God both locally and globally.

6. The New Calvinism is aggressively mission-driven, including missional impact on social evils, evangelistic impact on personal networks, and missionary impact on the unreached peoples of the world.

7. The New Calvinism is inter-denominational, with a strong (some would say oxymoronic) Baptistic element.

8. The New Calvinism includes both charismatics and non-charismatics.

9. The New Calvinism places a priority on pietism or piety in the Puritan vein, with an emphasis on the essential role of the affections in Christian living, while esteeming the life of the mind and being very productive in it, and embracing the value of serious scholarship.

10. The New Calvinism is vibrantly engaged in publishing books, and, even more remarkably, in the world of the Internet, with hundreds of energetic bloggers and social media activists, with Twitter as the increasingly-default way of signalling things new and old that should be noticed and read.

11. The New Calvinism is international in scope, multi-ethnic in expression, and culturally-diverse. There is no single geographic, racial, cultural, governing center. There are no officers, no organization, nor any loose affiliation that would encompass the whole. (As an aside, he adds: I would dare say there are outcroppings of this movement that no one in this room has ever heard of.)

12. The New Calvinism is robustly gospel-centered, cross-centered, with dozens of books rolling off the presses coming at the gospel from every conceivable angle and applying it to all areas of life, with a commitment to seeing the historic doctrine of justification finding its fruit in sanctification both personally and communally.

So what do you think? Would you have gone with the same features? Would you have added or skipped any of them?


  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    Weekend A La Carte (July 12)

    A La Carte: Where art thou Rob Bell? / The case against in vitro fertilization / Praying and weeping for those suffering in Texas / Greet each other with a holy hug / The example of Jimmy Swaggart / and more.

  • Thriving Marriage

    Thriving Marriage

    I have often wondered about the best time to write a book about marriage. When a couple is young, there is so much about marriage they have not yet experienced. They can still impart wisdom and teach lessons, of course, but there is so much of marriage that remains unknown to them. Yet when a…

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (July 11)

    A La Carte: Falling out of repentance / Tattoos as confession / The Epstein List and secret sins / Teaching generosity / Lessons from a former youth pastor / Bedbugs in the bowels of the city.

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (July 10)

    A La Carte: Questions for a maturing marriage / The lesbian seagulls that weren’t / But mommy, why? / A time to be tired / The modern rise of Stoicism / and more.

  • The Stranger

    The Stranger: A Short Film For You

    Based on a true story and inspired by the truth that character comes before competence, “The Stranger” is an honest, light-hearted and meaningful picture of what it means to truly serve others.

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (July 9)

    A La Carte: The singer who changed the course of my life / Stay on the line / Incompatible thick communities / Lulla-Bible? / The solution is not megachurch / Who were the Anabaptists? / and more.