What’s “new” about Calvinism?

Last summer I sat down and wrote A New Calvinism timeline.  Reading Collin Hansen’s, Young, Restless, and Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists, inspired me to collect a variety of events in recent history and put them together in one place.

You can read the timeline, but I wanted to touch on the matter again and to suggest in, say, four paragraphs, a means of discerning who’s who in the New Calvinism movement.

As far as I can tell, the phrase was coined by David Van Biema in a March 2009 article that appeared in Time Magazine’s “Ten Ideas Changing the World Right Now” issue. Van Biema is not paying attention to theology per se, but to popularity, commenting upon the rise in popularity of three leaders (Mark Driscoll, Al Mohler, and John Piper), a blog, and the sales figures of the ESV Bible. The point of the article, by the way, is not to distinguish between what is meant by “new.” Is this Calvinism new because what was once dormant has been revived, or new because what was once dormant has been revised?  This distinction, actually, is very important for understanding the New Calvinist movement.  Let me explain.

Self-professing, confident, shameless, Calvinists are appearing everywhere today. Perhaps in one way, this should make sense; Herman Bavinck, after all, comments in the early 20th century that “of all religious movements in America, Calvinism has been the most vigorous” and “constitutes the animating element” in a variety of denominational threads from Congregational to Baptist to Presbyterian. So, to see them popping up all over the American landscape should not be too terribly surprising; historically speaking, there’ve always been moles in this stretch of fairway. But when we say that the current generation is “new,” well, we need to know what this means.

Some of these contemporary Calvinists believe that New Calvinism is new because it is better than the old Calvinism. This is certainly the position of men like Mark Driscoll. In this regard, Old Calvinism needs some revising. But there are others who believe that New Calvinism is new simply because the Old Calvinism has returned from a period of latency. This is the position of men like Kevin DeYoung and Ligon Duncan. In this regard, Old Calvinism doesn’t need revising, it just needs reviving. The former believe that the rediscovered Old Calvinism needs revamping for today’s world. The latter believe that the rediscovered Old Calvinism needs republishing for today’s world.

To tie things together, New Calvinism is, necessarily, . . . eclectic! It is broad enough so that some of the historic high-points of Calvinism can be revived (the sovereignty of God, God’s initiative in conversion, complementarianism), while some need only be gently revised (baptism, the Lord’s Table, covenant theology, church government, confessionalism). So, for instance, Adam Omelianchuk can list a dozen New Calvinist pastors and we instantly see that they represent a spectrum of views on worship, ecclesiology, charismatic gifts, evangelism, eschatology, and baptism. Now, we could contend that Old Calvinism itself was just as multifaceted, but this would be stretching things a bit; the Old Calvinists may not have been die-stamped from the factory, but there was more unity than there is in this broader New Calvinism movement. Ultimately, I believe that a helpful lens for understanding the New Calvinism is to determine who is a reviser and who is a reviver. How can you tell? I don’t think it’s the “Jesus was a Calvinist” t-shirt. Instead, I think the revisers tend to edit Old Calvinism ecclesiology, while the revivers keep it unchanged.