Calvinism

Calvinism is the system of theology, named for the Reformer John Calvin, holding God to be sovereign over creation, providence, and salvation: he ordains whatsoever comes to pass, and saves whom he saves by his own good pleasure rather than by anything he foresees in them. In its narrower, more common sense the term refers to the five points of Calvinistic soteriology summarized in the acrostic TULIP. In its broader sense Calvinism is synonymous with Reformed theology, the doctrine held by the Reformed churches and confessed in documents such as the Westminster Confession and the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not use the word “Calvinism,” a later historical label rather than the confession’s own vocabulary, but its chapter “Of God’s Decree” states the doctrine the label refers to. God has chosen the elect in Christ “without any other thing in the creature as a condition or cause moving him thereunto,” not on the ground of anything “foreseen [in them] as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.”¹ Election rests instead on God’s “eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of his will.”²

Its chapters on free will, effectual calling, and the perseverance of the saints carry the same commitment through the rest of the order of salvation; see Total depravity, Monergism, and Perseverance of the saints for those chapters quoted at length.

Its confessional content is what Reformed writers have long called “Augustinianism as opposed to Semipelagianism,” a system “commonly called Calvinism.”³ The label attaches to Calvin because it was “largely thanks to Calvin that the doctrine of predestination was included in the confessions of all the Reformed churches,” among them the Canons of Dort, the Westminster Confession, and (through its Westminster and Savoy ancestry) the 1689 confession itself.⁴

Biblical Basis

Paul grounds election in God’s own choice, made “before the foundation of the world,” “according to the good pleasure of his will,” not according to any merit or foreseen response in those chosen (Eph. 1:4-5). Discussing Jacob and Esau, chosen and rejected before either “had done anything good or bad,” he draws the same conclusion: “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Rom. 9:11, 16). The same letter states the connection between God’s foreknowledge, calling, justification, and glorification as a single, unbroken chain: “those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Rom. 8:29-30).

Christ describes the same sovereignty at work in his own ministry: “All that the Father gives me will come to me… and this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me” (John 6:37, 39). No one comes to him “unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). Calvinism reads these texts, along with the five points of TULIP and the doctrines each names, as a coherent account of how God saves rather than as isolated proof texts; see Election and TULIP for that case argued in full.

Historical Development

Augustine against Pelagius

Calvinism’s soteriology did not originate with Calvin. Against Pelagius, who denied that the Fall left the will unable to turn to God apart from grace, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) argued that grace precedes and enables faith rather than merely assisting a will already capable of choosing God on its own. Calvinism, on this reckoning, is Augustine’s own doctrine of grace carried forward against a milder, semi-Pelagian synergism, which is why the position was sometimes called “Augustinianism” long before it bore Calvin’s name.³

Calvin and the Reformation

John Calvin (1509-1564) published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in Latin when he was twenty-six, and expanded it across several later editions without departing from the doctrines the first edition already set out.⁵ He defended the doctrine of predestination against Albertus Pighius in 1543 and against Jerome Bolsec in 1552, and against Rome’s teaching at the Council of Trent in 1547.⁶ Trent had responded to the Reformation by teaching that fallen free will, aided by a resistible, prevenient grace, cooperates with God toward its own justification.⁷ Calvin and the confessions that followed him held instead that grace effectually accomplishes what it intends, the difference at the center of the controversy the next generation settled at Dort.

The Remonstrance and the Synod of Dort

After Calvin’s death, followers of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius met at Gouda in 1610 and drew up a Remonstrance in five articles against the Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed churches: election conditioned on foreseen faith, a universal atonement, and a resistible grace.⁸ The Reformed churches answered at the Synod of Dort (1618-19), an international assembly that produced the Canons of Dort, rejecting the Remonstrant position and stating the Reformed doctrine of unconditional election in its place: “That some receive the gift of faith from God, and others do not receive it proceeds from God’s eternal decree… according to which decree, he graciously softens the hearts of the elect, however obstinate, and inclines them to believe, while he leaves the non-elect in his just judgment to their own wickedness and obduracy.”⁹ The Canons close by asking that the faith of the Reformed churches be judged “not from the calumnies, which… are heaped upon it… but from the public confessions of the Churches themselves.”¹⁰ A later popular summary arranged the Synod’s five points against the Remonstrants into the acrostic TULIP; see TULIP for each point in full.¹¹

Reformed scholasticism and confessional codification

The generation after Dort produced Reformed scholasticism’s systematic theologies, most notably Francis Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology (1679-85), which stated and defended Reformed doctrine, point by point, against Rome, the Socinians, and the Remonstrants alike. In England, the Westminster Assembly met for over five years and completed the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1648.¹² English Particular Baptists adapted the Westminster Confession, by way of the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration, into the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, carrying its Calvinistic doctrine of the decree, effectual calling, and perseverance into Baptist churches.

Opposing Views

Arminianism is Calvinism’s principal historic opponent within confessing Protestantism. Where Calvinism holds election to be unconditional, Arminianism holds it conditioned on God’s foreknowledge of who will believe; where Calvinism holds grace to be effectual, Arminianism holds it to be a resistible, universally offered prevenient grace that enables, but does not secure, a sinner’s response.⁸ Arminianism is a real, historic Christian position rather than a denial of the faith; see Arminianism for its case stated in full and for the confessional response to it.

Roman Catholic teaching, codified at the Council of Trent, likewise holds that fallen free will retains the capacity to cooperate with a resistible, prevenient grace toward its own justification, a form of synergism Trent affirmed against the Reformation.⁷ Later Catholic theology, in Luis de Molina’s account of divine “middle knowledge,” grounded God’s choice of the elect in his foreknowledge of how each person would freely respond to a given set of circumstances, reducing predestination to a form of foreknowledge rather than an unconditional decree.⁷ See Molinism for that position in full.

Objections and Responses

Calvinism makes God the author of sin. If God ordains whatsoever comes to pass, including sinful acts, God can seem as responsible for it as the creature who commits it. Bavinck replies that Scripture places sin within God’s providential government without making God its agent: “The word ‘permission’… fails utterly to answer the objection that God is the author of sin, and in fact withdraws sin from God’s providential government. All ‘permission’ is an act of God’s will; he willed to permit it. But God is never the agent of sin; only creatures are.”¹³ Sin has God as, at most, a “deficient” rather than an “efficient” cause: it is a privation, not a positive thing God produces.¹³ See Concurrence and Problem of evil for this doctrine argued in full.

Calvinism undermines evangelism. If God has already determined who will be saved, preaching, praying, and evangelizing can seem pointless. Boettner responds that the objection “is based on the fallacy that the ends are determined without reference to the means”: God foreordains the means along with the ends they accomplish. “If God has ordained a man to be saved, He has also ordained that he shall hear the Gospel, and that he shall believe and repent.”¹⁴ On this account, the same decree that secures the elect’s salvation also secures the preaching, praying, and evangelizing God has appointed to bring it about, rather than rendering them pointless.

Unconditional election is unjust. If God chooses some and passes over others without regard to anything in them, the choice can seem arbitrary or unfair. A. A. Hodge answers that justice is not the category in question: “Justice necessarily holds all sinners alike destitute of all claims upon God’s favor. It is unjust to justify the unjust… salvation must be of grace, and it must rest upon the sovereign option of God himself whether he provides salvation for few, many, or for none.”¹⁵ Because no sinner has a claim on salvation to begin with, giving it to some is grace, not injustice to the rest.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 2, text as transcribed by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (the1689confession.com and other confession-text sites were unreachable from this session). ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 3, para. 5. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 99. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 291. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 9. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 9. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 21-87. ↩ ↩²
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), “Of Divine Predestination,” art. 6. ↩
Canons of Dort, Conclusion. ↩
Boettner, 43. ↩
Boettner, 248-249. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 12, “The Fallen World.” ↩ ↩²
Boettner, 186. ↩
Hodge, 225-226. ↩