I was aware that the word “Calvinist” is often used to refer to Protestants who believe in predestination, meaning that God has decided in advance who will be saved and who won’t—in technical terms, who is among the “elect” and who isn’t. This was a matter I had never given much thought to, because I grew up in Baptist circles in southern England and belong today to a congregation in Australia that practices adult baptism. Baptists tend to be “Arminians”, That is, they reject the concept of the elect because they believe that salvation is freely offered to all who believe in Jesus (Romans 3:22). It seems to be American writers who most often use the terms “Calvinist” and “Reformed”, and my unfamiliarity with them perhaps reflects my Christian biography.
Anyway, back to my reading. I consulted several tomes that might help me better understand how the terms “Calvinist” and “Reformed” are used by those who employ them professionally. I soon learned that some writers (e.g. Trueman 2004:230; Allen 2010:4) reject the term “Calvinist”, first because they find it pejorative, and secondly because it implies that John Calvin (Jean Chauvin, 1509–1564) was the principal founder of the tradition that it refers to (see below). There is also broad agreement that the term “Reformed” can be used in much the same sense as “Calvinist”, without the latter’s negative associations (Allen 2010:3; Gerrish 2004:290).
There is a small complication here. Some people use “reformed” to mean ‘arising from the Reformation’, that is, they use it to refer to all or most Protestant theologies. But this usage seems to be rare. Allen (5–6 ) suggests the word “Reformational” for this sense, reserving “Reformed” for the Christian tradition which has its roots in the contributions of Calvin and his associates to the Reformation, and thereby excludes the Lutheran, Anglican and Baptist traditions (and later the Wesleyan tradition). Many “Reformed” denominations label themselves “Presbyterian”, referring to the office of presbyter or elder that plays a role in their governance.
In order to understand the two terms more closely, I needed to understand the meaning of the doctrine of predestination. Paul uses the verb ‘predestined’ four times, in Romans 8:29–30 and Ephesians 1:5 and 1:11. Perhaps the history of the doctrine began here, but it was enunciated by Augustine (354–430), who deployed it in his argument against his contemporary Pelagius (c. 355 – c. 420). Pelagius taught that Christians could and should lead exemplary lives by their own will. Augustine (see references below) countered that a person needed God’s grace to do anything other than lead a sinful life, and this need meant that the ‘act of faith’ itself, i.e. coming to belief in Jesus, was a gift of God’s grace. Hence, for Augustine, this act was a gift of God given to the elect, not an act of human will.
Many modern Protestants, including me, have tended to look upon the Reformation in the sixteenth century as the beginning of our kind of Christian history. But we need to think ourselves into the situation of Reformers like Calvin, for whom there was a long tradition stretching from the early Church Fathers to the scholastic tradition of the European Middle Ages. The Reformers didn’t begin with an empty canvas: they knew and respected Christian writers of the previous 1500 years, but set out to reform the structures of the Catholic church that ran counter to the New Testament and its many interpreters. Calvin inherited the concept of predestination from Augustine, even though he disagreed with him in certain respects, e.g. the fate of babies who died before baptism (Gerrish 2004:290-293).
Various scholars have argued that predestination did not play a major role in Calvin’s thinking. In his early Catechism (1538) he warns Christians not to speculate about who is among the elect but to look to Jesus, in whom we were chosen before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4) (Hesselink 2004:84). McGrath (2007:381-382) comments that Calvin’s view of predestination was pragmatic. It was not based on an exercise of logic but on the evidence around him that not everyone received God’s grace. Calvin’s method was inductive. He paid relatively little attention to predestination and election in his monumental Institutes of the Christian religion,1 which is not a systematic theology (Hesselink 2004:77, Trueman 226) and where Calvin’s starting point is the historical event of Jesus.
But after Calvin’s death, Theodorus Beza (Théodore de Bèze, 1519-1605), his successor as director of the Genevan Academy (the training institute for Reformed pastors) formulated a systematic theology that was deduced from general principles in the mediaeval scholastic tradition. As his starting point he took the doctrine of election, so that predestination became a controlling principle, and the effect of the atonement was restricted to the elect (McGrath 2007:381-382). The Canons of the Synod of Dordt (1618–19),2 followed through on this, and Articles 9-11 present the doctrine of election with chilling clarity. The elect are saved. Those not among the elect are damned. This is God’s decision from before creation, and cannot be changed by human will. The confessional statements of the Reformed churches are united on these five points and on other matters (Allen 2010:3-4, Holder 2004:250).
The Synod had been called in response to The five articles of remonstrance,3 a document presented to the parliament of the Dutch Republic in 1610 by a group of Reformed believers who rejected the doctrine of election in its Calvinist formulation. Their theologian leader was Jacobus Arminius (Jakob Hermanszoon, 1560–1609), who sought to moderate interpretation of predestination on Reformed doctrine. Hence the term “Arminian”, mentioned above.
This post has been an explication of terms, mainly for my own sake. It is not intended as a polemic, but the fact that I am broadly speaking Arminian in my leanings will be obvious. As a matter of personal experience and of acquaintance with others, I see people as having free will, albeit marred by their fallenness and brokenness, but capable, often after a struggle, of coming to belief in Jesus. According to the Calvinist position, this exercise of the will must be an illusion, but I can’t relate this to the reality I perceive. Above all, I know and love the God who is seen in Jesus, and I can’t relate this to the Canons of Dordt. To put this into scholastic form: God wants us to choose to love him; we can’t love him without free will; therefore we have free will.
Paul’s usage does not seem to me to bar this interpretation. In Romans 8:29 he writes “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” God, being omniscient and eternal, knew who would choose to love him, and he decided that they would be conformed to the image of his Son. God’s eternity means that he is timeless. This implies that the verbs foreknow ‘know before’ and predestine ‘decide before’, entailing time, are Paul’s anthropomorphic way of grasping after a mystery.
I realise that a professional theologian reading this post will either grin or grimace. Thousands of pages have been written on the topics I have ventured to touch on rather crudely here. I also know from Gerrish (2004:302) that the ideas behind the Canons of Dordt have been severely criticised within the Reformed tradition, among others by Karl Barth, a minister of a Reformed denomination (Church Dogmatics, II/2, §§ 32–35).
Footnotes
- Published in 1559 in Latin as Institutio Christianae religionis. The most recent English translation is noted under MacNeill 2006 in the references.↩
- The full monstrous title is Iudicium Synodi Nationalis Reformatorum ecclesiarum Belicarum habitae Dordrechti de quinque doctrinae capitibus in Ecclesiis Belgicis controversis (‘The decision of the National Synod of Belgic [i.e. Netherlands and Belgium] Reformed Churches held at Dordrecht on the five main points of doctrine in dispute in the Belgic churches.’ An English translation of the text is readily available on line at, for example, here.↩
- Originally published in Dutch in 1612, then in a Latin version in 1616. An English translation can be found on several websites, for example, here.↩