The “John Calvin” Mini-Conference wrapped up with a Q&A session featuring the four men who had delivered addresses. It was moderated by John Duncan. This is roughly how it went…

Why is Calvin still important 500 years later?

Ferguson - because he was really the first great biblical exegete. Other theologians made a mark here and there, but none so great as Calvin. He had a genius for being to capture what the text was saying and what its implications were.

Lawson - Location, location, location. He finds himself in an important historical context in the greatest forward movement of Christianity since the second century. It was a perfect time for Calvin’s ideas to explode in a way that could influence successive generations unlike those that had come before. There was a kind of domino effect from Calvin on down through history.

Mohler - Calvin really was the combination of the systematician and the preacher. As great as Luther may have been, he did not leave behind a systematic theology. In Calvin’s day, to consider what was at stake, the crucial question surrounded what was the true church. We still talk about Calvin today because we face many of the same challenges today that he faced in his day. No one answered these questions with the quintessential clarity of Calvin.

Duncan - Calvin taught the people who in turn taught the successive generation so that people who were influenced by Calvin may not have even know his name. He was training the best of the current generation to train the next generation. It was only centuries later that we began to understand the magnitude of what he had done.

Where should people start to learn about Calvin?

Ferguson - If you are daunted by the Institutes, begin with The Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life. You will probably find that Calvin is not as daunting as it may seem. If he didn’t know that Packer was going to do it, he probably would have called this book Knowing God.

Lawson - Read his sermons. The preaching of the word is the primary ordinary means of grace. Begin with his sermons on Galatians and Ephesians.

Mohler - Dive into the deep end of the pool by reading the introduction to the Institutes. Even if you need to read them two or three times, read them! It is one of the greatest works of Christian devotional literature ever written.

Duncan - I suggest going through the Institutes with your pastor or with a good teacher who has read through them before. I also some lectures from Rutherford House (?) by Sinclair Ferguson.

What is one thing about Calvin that is unknown or misunderstood that Calvin heir’s should know?

Ferguson - I know what his favorite game was. It was keys - you would throw a set of keys over a table and whoever puts it over the edge of the table wins.

Mohler - People often miss the suffering of the man. He was a man who suffered almost every day of his life with infirmities, sicknesses, pains and had to study and teach under the most difficult of circumstances. Despite this, in his writings you find such joy in his piety.

Duncan - If all you know is that he is the “Tyrant of Geneva” you may need to know that he was not a citizen of Geneva until the last years of his life. The idea that he was in full control of the city is simply fiction. He also a great power in the missionary movement that sent missionaries around the world.

Lawson - Calvin’s personal logo summarizes his life. It is an open hand being offered up to God and a heart in the palm of the hand that was his heart offered to God. His life, his heart, given to God promptly and willingly. When you combine this kind of godliness with this kind of genius, it is a powerful force (much like Jonathan Edwards).

Ferguson - He had an amazing number of friends who very much loved him. This is, in many ways, the measure of a man in contrast to the caricatures we often hear.

Lawson - Many people are unaware of how long and how strenuously he was opposed in his church.

Calvin is often criticized for his role in the execution of Servetus. Summarize what happened and our take on the situation.

Duncan - Servetus was a heretic, viewed by both Catholics and Protestants as a heretic. In any city in Europe there were heresy laws in those days; Geneva was not the only one with such laws. There were certain expectations in terms of public theology and morality that were expected of anyone. He was warned not to come to Geneva and was warned that he would be arrested and tried. He was subsequently condemned by the council to the burned at the stake. Calvin asked for the sentence to be changed to something quicker and less painful but this was denied.

Mohler - It is difficult to think of this from our perspective in a modern democratic republic. The medieval world is really unthinkable to us. In that day every single European state defined heresy as treason. To go against the religious beliefs of the state was to commit treason against it. Heresy was a threat to the entire society. This is true even today; however, government is not the right agent to deal with heresy. One of the big complexities to understand Calvin’s Geneva is to understand the role in Geneva in separating church and state. Servetus was the kind of heretic who would have known that everyone knew of his heresy. He was a needler, liar, etc, etc. The modern world gets it wrong in thinking that heresy is a minor crime while treason is a major one. But we would not call upon the city or state to judge such a person but instead we would rely on the church.

Ferguson - Calvin has become the whipping boy for something that continued for another 100 years.

Lawson - Calvin did not put him to death; he was not even a citizen of Geneva at the time and had no say in political matters. The consistory were his enemies at the time and had no love for Calvin. Servetus was given the option of being sent back to France and he begged to stay in Geneva because he knew that what would happen there would be far more gruesome. Calvin did, indeed, give support to what was taking place, but it was not in his hands to do it.

Mohler - Intellectual honesty is rare in this situation. To single Calvin out in this case is really an ad hominem attack. This civilization understood that heresy was the greatest of all crimes and was judged to protect people from error. They did this in the wrong way, but how much better are we who consider heresy a small threat?

What was Calvin’s relationship with Luther and Luther’s followers?

Ferguson - It was distant. They had almost definitely never met. It is clear in Calvin’s writing that he felt the church owed an enormous debt to Luther; he regarded Luther as almost a new Apostle. There were elements of Luther’s theology that troubled him, but he was as careful as he could be that he corrected this theology without making it clear what theology he was correcting.

Mohler - You have to make a distinction between phases of Calvin’s theology. He always considered Luther like a spiritual father. He had a very warm respect for Luther. His relationship with Melancthon was very interesting; he had good correspondence with him, but there was always a distance. As he saw Melancthon addressing different issues, he became troubled about continued refusal to bring the Reformation to its necessary conclusion. There was lots of indebtedness and affection and a hope for greater unity, but ultimately some disappointment.

Are there aspects of Calvin’s thought that we should not follow?

Mohler - You’ve got two Baptists here. [much laughter] One issue is this: what is Calvinism? When people think Calvinism they are often thinking of just a Dortian summary of theology. I am a Baptist who is indebted to Calvinism (as are all Baptists, whether they know it or not). It is wholesome to look back to that indebtedness and acknowledge our debt to him. When you look at the totality of what Calvin taught, there are many Presbyterians who are not thoroughly Calvinistic. I am going to be very thankful for all I receive, but I think Calvin would be the first to say that he had no desire to create “Calvinists.”

We’re familiar with the five points of Calvinism. What was truly central to his theology?

Ferguson - For Calvin there is such a unity that I don’t know that he would give precedence to any one of them. There seems to be two things that happen as his theology grows from one edition of the Institutes to the next. The first was the impact of Romans on his thought. The second thing that seems to dominate their development is his immense Trinitarianism, both its unity and distinctiveness. In some ways it seems that he’s almost the first Christian writer to get this just right.

Mohler - The knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves is the beginning and end of Calvin’s theology. When they talk about Calvinism and jump straight to the five points, we need to realize that we are reducing Calvin’s great concern and passion for the knowledge of God to this important dimension of how God justifies sinner and how he determined before the world was created that he would save a people through his Son. I would warn against reducing Calvinism to those five points even while affirming and defending those points. You can miss the whole in the parts if you are not careful.

Duncan - We need to remember that Calvin never did write out five points. Those five points stemmed from his work but only fifty years after his death as a response to five points of Arminianism.

How has Calvinism become to be seen as a loyalty that takes precedent over our identity as Christians?

Ferguson - When Calvin’s teaching came under attack and others rushed to his defense, you tend to get -isms. This is one of the reasons people need to go back and read Calvin himself and when they do so they find a world very different from the one they expected to find.

Mohler - [I couldn’t quite catch or nicely summarize this one. Apologies]. I did appreciate his exhortation to read Calvin (whether sermons or books) with an open Bible. Calvin would expect no less!

Duncan - Our non-Calvinistic friends can be hurt by the attitude that Calvinism is Christianity. It is helpful that someone have a high view of God, of Christ, of the Bible, than it is to attach themselves to any label. The good reason that we use label is for theological shorthand, as it allows us to say a lot really quickly. It allows us to affirm and deny certain things in just a word. If people are afraid of Calvinistic terms and analogies, simply go in as a Bible-believing Christian, go to Scripture, and see what God says to you and to them from his Word.

Leave us with something very important you’ve learned from Calvin’s life or writings

Ferguson - He has been the model of what a gospel minister in a local congregation should be.

Lawson - To understand Calvin is to understand Calvin the preacher. He was many things, but primarily a preacher. This is what is so desperately needed in churches today.

Mohler - I am in agreement with the other two so will just add this. Calvin was also a teacher and he understood the necessity of the church to be a school. We want the churches to again be the schools of Christ. I want to die like Calvin died, studying and teaching and preaching to the end. Calvin didn’t retire; he died.

Duncan - Calvin taught me that the fundamental problem we face as human beings is idolatry. There are true worshippers of God and idolaters; that is all. The doctrine of the atonement—Calvin gave the best biblical explanation of the atonement that had been given in 1560 years. There have been great ones since, but none before.

As you may know, I decided to read through both of the Finding God in The Shack books released this month (two books, two authors, one title). Last week I reviewed the first of these (see: Finding God in the Shack (1)) and in a day or two I will review the second. But first, I wanted to share a few quotes from the book.

It is not lost on me that the majority of the people who vocalized objections to The Shack were Calvinists (Al Mohler, Mark Driscoll, Yours Truly, etc). Randal Rauser and Roger Olson noted this as well and both make a point of refuting some components of Calvinistic theology in their books. Rauser, a Professor of Historical Theology at Taylor Seminary, touches on Calvinism several times, but does so primarily under the heading of “The Biggest Problem in the Universe”—a chapter that deals with theodicy (the justice and goodness of God in the face of suffering). This is, after all, one of the main themes of The Shack and one whose treatment offended many Calvinist readers. Unfortunately, Rauser’s portrayal of Calvinism is, in many ways, just plain wrong. It is offensive and almost libelous at times. I am a Calvinist and have been for many years. Never have I heard anyone claim what Rauser says to be true of Calvinism.

Here are a few examples. I have taken the liberty of bolding a few of the most outrageous statements.

*****

Our first pass at theodicy will consider the possibility that God is not all-loving. While this may come as a surprise to many Christians, this is the position of a major theological tradition called Calvinism. … To be more specific, Calvinists believe that God is perfect in his love, but he chooses not to show this love to all his creatures.

To begin with, the Calvinist believes that God controls all events perfectly, including free human choices. That is, God gives us the desires that we freely fulfill, both good and bad. (Other Christians disagree and think instead that while God can know what we will do in advance, he cannot make us do it if we are truly free.) As a result, Calvinists believe that God could have made the world such that Adam and Eve would never have fallen. It follows that Adam and Eve sinned because God gave them the free desires to sin. Likewise, the Little Ladykiller [the villain of The Shack] sinned because God gave him the will to sin. Everyone who sins does so because God has formed his or her character to do so. As Paul tersely put it, “Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden” (Romans 9:18). So the reason there is evil in the world is simple: though perfectly loving, God wants there to be some evil!

This Calvinist view raises an obvious question: why would a perfectly loving God desire evil in the world? In order to explain this, the Calvinist denies what many Christians assume: that God loves all his creatures equally. Rather, God’s ultimate concern is to manifest his glory most fully. Therefore, God is concerned to ensure that creation provides the best opportunity for God to display his magnificent attributes. … [A]dversity within creation provides an opportunity for God to display his leadership qualities.

In the midst of adversity God is able to manifest his mercy and love to those creatures he has decreed to choose the good. At the same time, he manifests his wrath and justice to those creatures he has decreed to choose the evil (Romans 9:22-23). Through all good and evil, God’s glory is more fully on display than if he had willed a creation where everyone did his will perfectly. One final point: the same reasoning that applies to the present age applies in eternity as well. There, too, rebellion must be present so God’s fullest display of attributes can be manifest. As such, Calvinists believe that God decrees that some people would reject the offer of salvation so God can rightly damn them eternally and thereby ensure that his perfect wrath and justice are both forever on display.

…

I confess that I am one of many people who find Calvinism not only unpalatable but nearly incomprehensible. Let’s start with God’s glory. I don’t accept that the only way to have a high appreciation of God’s glory is by seeing God crush human rebellion. There have been many great leaders in history who led their people in peacetime. Couldn’t God have fully displayed his attributes through peaceful rule as well? Indeed, Calvinism is in danger of Manichaeism, the view that good and evil are equal and necessary opposites so that good can only be known to the extent that evil exists. But my biggest problem is with Calvinism’s view of God’s love. Contrary to the Calvinist claim that God only loves some creatures and hates others, I believe that God loves all people (1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9).

*****

My reaction when reading all of this was, if not anger, real frustration. I hate to think that thousands of people will read such an inaccurate, uninformed, fictitious view of Calvinism (and this by an author who has some credibility by virtue of his position as a Professor of Theology). Even where Rauser is correct, his words often lack the charitable nuance we might well hope for. But in so many ways he is really, really wrong. Not surprisingly, he does not quote any sources; I know of none that would support his statements.

I thought of writing an article to refute some of the worst of these statements. But then I found myself thinking about R.C. Sproul’s book Getting the Gospel Right. Here Sproul exhorts Christians to be careful in the way they portray what other people believe. The context of the book is a defense of the gospel against Catholicism and he says, rightly I think, that Christians often caricature Roman Catholic theology, not taking the time to find what the Church really teaches. It is too simplistic to say “Protestantism is about grace and Catholicism is about works.” I know I’ve been guilty of this myself. Sometimes it is easier to take the little tidbits we have heard from others, assume they are fact, and build a case. But I think we owe it to others to truly understand before we determine that we know the facts.

So when I saw this nonsense that Rauser had passed off as fact, I guess I saw an opportunity to ensure that when I speak out against Arminianism or Open Theism or Catholicism or any other area of poor or false theology, I do so with grace and I do so only after ensuring that I know what I am speaking about. There have been too many times when I’ve failed to do just that.

Read an outside view on Calvinists or Calvinism, and you are sure to read something about God’s wrath. The God of Calvinism is a wrathful, vengeful God, boiling over in anger against any part of creation that has turned against him. He is no God of love, this. Sure, he may have some love for his elect, but to the rest of the world he is this angry, brooding presence eagerly awaiting the day of judgment in which he will cast the rest of humanity into the flames of hell.

I suppose Calvinists have sometimes given others reason to think that this is what we believe to be true of God. Perhaps Calvinists have at times erred by over-emphasizing God’s wrath and have done so at the expense of his love. But this angry, vengeful God is not the true God of the Calvinist.

It is good and useful, though, to consider the relationship of God’s love to his wrath. Are they equal characteristics or is one greater than the other? How can God both love and hate? Just recently I read a powerful response. It came from the pen (or more likely, the keyboard) of Michael Wittmer, professor of systematic and historical theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. Do not let the title intimidate you. His new book Don’t Stop Believing (his previous book is Heaven Is a Place on Earth—anyone else noticing a pattern here?) is a very good, popular-level look at some of the hard questions facing Christians today. One of those questions concerns the cross and whether, as some have suggested, a traditional Christian understanding of the cross is tantamount to cosmic child abuse.

In this chapter Wittmer explains how we can (and must) reconcile God’s wrath with his love. “Scripture says that God is love and that he has wrath. This means that love lies deeper than wrath in the character of God. Love is his essential perfection, without which he would not be who he is. Wrath is love’s response to sin. It is God’s voluntary gag reflex at anything that destroys his good creation. God is against sin because he is for us, and he will vent his fury on everything that damages us.”

Love is at God’s very core. 1 John 4:8 says, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” Through all of eternity, God has been love; he has existed in a state of love of Father to Son, Son to Spirit, Spirit to Father. There has never been a time that God has not been expressing love; nor will there ever be. But God’s wrath is far different. God has not always been wrathful. He has not always had to express anger. His anger is a reaction to a lack of love—a lack of love for him or a lack of love to others. Wrath is a response to sin. Thus wrath did not exist until sin existed. And as sin came to be, God had to respond to it in a way befitting his holy character. God’s response to sin is wrath. How could it be otherwise? Sin is cosmic treason against the Creator of the universe. He must respond.

At the cross, God’s love met God’s wrath. Wittmer says, “Jesus endured God’s wrath when he bore the curse of sin, but he also experienced God’s love, for the cross was a necessary step in crowning Jesus as Redeemer and Ruler of the world, the Lord whose exalted name forces every knee to the ground. Similarly, though we receive unmerited grace from Jesus’ passion, our old self of sin must die in order to rise to his new life of love.” And so wrath is closely tied to love. If God did not love, God would not be wrathful. It is because of his love that God has to feel and express his wrath. We cannot neatly separate the two. “Every act of God flows from his love, even—and especially—those that demonstrate his wrath.”

Is he a God of love or of wrath? God expresses both love and wrath, but where wrath is demonstrated, love is personified. God is love.

Today marks the beginning of the John 3:16 Conference. Sponsored by Jerry Vines Ministries, the conference allows some of the Southern Baptists Convention’s foremost pastors to respond to the growing presence of Calvinistic theology in the Convention. “Did Jesus die on the cross for every person? Are believers eternally secure? Can grace be resisted? These and many other questions will be addressed. This conference is not going to be a ‘Let’s bash the Calvinists’ conference. This conference is going to be a biblical and theological assessment of and response to 5-point Calvinism. It will be helpful for lay people as well as preachers.”

While I had at first intended to attend the conference, I eventually accepted a conflicting invitation to visit the Dominican Republic with Compassion International. However, Andrew Lindsey was kind enough to volunteer his services as a liveblogger. For the next two days, he will bring live summaries of the conference. You’ll be able to read them right here at the blog. Stay tuned beginning this evening!

It was quite a while ago that I received an email from a father, concerned about the task of sharing the gospel with his children. While I answered the email then, I also filed it away for further thought. Today I want to answer it in a little bit more detail. Here is what this reader wrote to me:

I have such a hard time grasping this notion of election as a father. God made the very emotions in me (love, care, would lie down in front of an 18-wheeler for my children….he gave me that). But nothing can assure me that i can have an influence in whether their “number was called”?

I would appreciate any thoughts you have on this as I’m really struggling with it. Also struggle with why so much of Bible addresses us as decision making/choice making creature, appealing to us to recognize something and depart from sin and accept Christ. If God is simply “zapping” us with irresistible Grace, then it seems rigged and the begging / pleading to turn away sin and accept Christ is really not genuine? I just haven’t been able to reconcile these two paradoxes of Truth that seem to exist between Calvinisms viewpoint and choice.

I certainly understand the heart behind this question. I, too, am a father and one who is deeply concerned about the eternal welfare of my children. I love them so deeply and desire nothing greater than that they would turn to Christ in repentance and faith. Like this reader, I am sometimes tempted to express frustration with the way God has chosen to save a people for himself. But through it all I know that his ways are good; his ways are the best.

I will break my answer into three parts.

First, I think we need to have much greater confidence in God’s sovereignty than in the ability of our children to choose God without his foreordaining grace. This is why Calvinistic theology begins with “T” for Total Depravity. This doctrine tells us that without God’s grace, none of us could ever turn to him. We are so radically depraved that we are unable, totally unable, to follow God or to even want to follow God. Thus if we properly understand human nature, we will thank God that he has not left us ultimately responsible to choose whether or not we would want to be saved. The Bible tells us clearly that we would never make such a choice; we could never make such a choice. So we need to take refuge in God’s sovereignty and not make it an occasion of fear or dread. Our hearts are so wholly polluted by sin that God’s election is the only way that anyone could be saved, ever.

Second, I think it is helpful to see predestination as something that is of far greater concern to God than to us. While we see from Scripture that God has predestined his elect to eternal life, I’m not sure that it is helpful for us to think too much about who is among the elect and who is not. God has not seen fit to reveal that information to us. Charles Spurgeon once said something along these lines: “if a stripe were painted down the backs of the elect, then I’d go around lifting up coat-tails.” But there is no such mark; we cannot know infallibly who is among the elect. Human experience tells us that some people who seem to have everything going for them—great natural ability, an early interest in the Christian faith, a childhood spent in a Christian home—turn away from Christ while others come from the most unusual and rebellious circumstances and are drawn to him. Some people we could have sworn were Christians have fallen away while some who were utter rebels have had their hearts turned to God. We just cannot know who is counted among the elect.

When it comes to the task of preaching the gospel, we sometimes make a false distinction between the means and the end, assuming that since God has ordained the end we ought to take little interest in the means. When we hear of hypercalvinists, we hear of people who do just this. These people insist that, since God has already ordained who will be saved, we need to have little involvement with calling people to turn to him in repentance and faith. They say that we have no business extending the free call of the gospel to those who are unregenerate. But nothing could be further from the truth. While God has, indeed, ordained who will be saved, he has not told us who he will save. And so we are called us to take the gospel message far and wide, preaching it to all men and allowing God to work the gift of faith into those whom he has chosen for life. Our task in evangelism is not ultimately to win people to Christ but to faithfully preach the gospel message. If we have preached that message, we have done what God calls us to. We then leave the results to him.

Third, we need to be careful in how we understand God’s work of election. The Bible does not describe this work as “zapping” or “random” or anything of the sort. We know that God has chosen a people for Himself but he has not told us why or how. Scripture does not say that certain people “had their number called” and others did not. Instead, we read that God chose some because he had special love for them. There is nothing random about it. It is difficult to illustrate this, but I think we could turn to adoption as an example, albeit an imperfect one. When a couple sets out to adopt a child, they have a large number of potential children available to them. But somewhere in the process of adoption they set their heart on a particular child. It is not that they have chosen this child randomly and (hopefully!) they have not chosen this child for what he or she can do for them. Instead they have chosen to love this child, setting their affections upon him. I do not think many adoptive parents look at their selection of a child as random or arbitrary. Furthermore, their selection of a particular child is not unfair to the other children. One child was graciously selected for the special blessing of adoption while many others were not. Giving a gift to one person does not make it unfair to withhold a gift from another.

Too often, I think, we approach this subject from the point-of-view that every person deserves a chance to go to heaven. We see our sweet children and are unable to believe that they justly deserve an eternity of separation from God. And so we deem it unfair that they may not be among the elect and hence can never turn to Christ. But Scripture tells us that all men, even children, have turned away from Christ. All men have committed an act of cosmic treason and deserve to be punished for it. God chooses to extend grace to some, but not all. But the very fact that it is grace tells us that it is not deserved; it is a free gift.

I conclude by pointing again to the goodness (Psalm 107:1, James 1:17, Psalm 84:11) and sovereignty (1 Samuel 2:6-7, Psalm 135:5-6, Proverbs 16:9) of God. God is good and does only what is good. This is as true in election as in any other area. When the Lord calls us home and when we stand before him, we know that none of us will question God’s wisdom; none of us will deem him unfair or unkind. We will rejoice in his goodness and will rejoice in his sovereign choice.

Though it is the emerging church that seems to have received so much attention in the past few years, just under the radar there has also been a quiet and steady growth of interest in far more traditional Reformed theology. All across North America (and perhaps beyond) Christians, and young Christians in particular, have been rediscovering the church's historic theology. These disparate movements seem to have grown from a common source--a reaction against the kind of "big box Christianity" of the church growth movement. Tired of seeing people as products and weary of experiencing church as a form of entertainment, church-goers have searched to find churches that offer a more satisfying approach to the Christian life. Many have gravitated towards emerging churches. Many others, though, have taken the opposite approach and have discovered the theology of the Reformation.