By Chaplain Mike

For the past twenty years, I have lived in America’s heartland, in the region where the Second Great Awakening occurred. It’s almost all revivalism all the time around here. Churches that predominate are Methodist, Baptist, Wesleyan, Nazarene, Church of God, Campbellite Christian, and so on. If churches in our area are not connected with those denominations, they tend to follow more modern forms of revivalism, such as the seeker-oriented model. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had discussions with people about how weak the Bible teaching and how shallow the theological depth is in these parts.

I consider myself blessed to have had extremely good teachers in my Christian walk. My youth pastor led in-depth Bible studies. Our minister practiced expository preaching. I attended Bible college because the Word was so prominent there. As a fairly new convert, I was like a sponge.

The school I attended was strongly dispensationalist in orientation. The only mentions of Reformed (or covenant) theology were negative in tone. Our school intentionally separated itself from “Calvinism” because we claimed to take the Bible literally, whereas Reformed theology spiritualized its plain teaching. After all, they believed in things like amillennialism and infant baptism, as well as the TULIP outline of salvation, which we thought went too far. Our church history education as well as our grasp on the history of interpretation was sorely lacking. You might say we were “Bible only” fundamentalists.Continue reading “My Debt to Reformed Theology”

The third week of our conversations about “Three Streams of Post-Evangelicalism” will focus on a movement that has received attention from the secular media as well as from within the church. It has been deemed the “New Calvinism”.

We are responding to Scot McKnight’s recent article in which he identified three alternative paths replacing the old “neo-evangelical coalition”: the Emerging movement, the Ancient-Future movement, and the new Calvinism. We invite you to join us this week as we discuss this third alternative, keeping in mind that we are aiming for a robust and healthy discussion.

We are doing this precisely because we are NOT experts with regard to these movements. We want to learn more. We want to hear your experiences. As pilgrims trying to negotiate the post-evangelical landscape, we are interested to hear of your involvement and interaction with these groups that have grown so much in recent years. Please join the conversation.

On March 12, 2009, Time magazine presented a list of “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now”. Number 3 on the list? David van Biema said it is “The New Calvinism”.

Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don’t operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, “everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world” — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle’s pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom’s hottest links. (emphasis mine)

Continue reading “The New Calvinism”