New.Demonstration

Time Magazine recently ran an article in their online home, Time.com, entitled “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.” Top one on the list is, “Jobs are the New Assets”, where it brings to mind, rather brings back the importance of “Jobs.” Next on the list is, “Recycling the Suburbs.” In essence it’s about salvaging the suburbs, saving it from inevitable death from the absence of commercial infrastructures.

Now you may be wondering why do I even bother to write about this?

Well, that’s ‘coz of the third biggest idea changing the world right now is “The New Calvinism.”

Yep, you’ve heard it right folks. Calvinism. No, not another evangelical fad. Not another “pseudo-revival”/manifestation of the spirit—a.k.a. delusions. But a resurgence of Reformation Theology.

If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard “The Old Rugged Cross,” a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are…well, hark the David Crowder Band: “I am full of earth/ You are heaven’s worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity.”

Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin’s 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism’s buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism’s latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination’s logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time’s dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.

Though some of us might disagree to what this “New Calvinism” actually defines, this is indeed a step in the right direction, i.e. Mark Driscoll’s view on what this “New Calvinism” is. But it cannot be denied what Calvinism or Reformed theology fundamentally is. No matter what other reformed folk would say, all that is meant by this resurgence of Reformation theology is a returning to and an exalting of Scripture once again.

Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation’s other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don’t have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by “glorifying” him.

It’s amazing how a secular Magazine can get it right when the majority of our non-reformed brethren get it so wrong.

Picking up from Justin Taylor in the Between Two Worlds blog on the issue, where he suggested that it’s good to pause to reflect on what Carson wrote for Hansen’s Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists:

While other movements have been making a bigger splash in the headlines, a number of strategic ministries have been quietly (and sometimes not so quietly!) upholding the doctrines of grace, planting churches, seeing people converted, teaching the whole counsel of God. These are now beginning to coalesce in a variety of mutually encouraging ways. It is a pleasure to recommend Collin Hansen’s survey of some of these movements. This is not the time for Reformed triumphalism. It is the time for quiet gratitude to God and earnest intercessory prayer, with tears, that what has begun well will flourish beyond all human expectation.

The Lord is indeed causing an awakening in our generation! An awakening of hearts and minds to seek the truth of God’s Word and the importance of giving our lives to that all encompassing duty of knowing Him and His gospel! Praise God for this grace! God was under no obligation at all to do this thing in our time. He could have left the evangelical world to be lost ever more in the machinations of it’s own wants, and He would still be glorious. I do not understand why He would still do such a thing. I do not understand why He would cause the great awakening in the time of Jonathan Edwards, or even the sweeping of souls into the Kingdom in the time of George Whitefield. No reason whatsoever may be found but that it seemed good in His sight.

Dear soul, before we get all excited with this news and go off telling others and going crazy with zeal in our service to God, do take time to fall on your knees and pray. He could have left us alone yet in His grace and mercy He still caused this to happen in our world. Let us thank Him, and in turn, let us continue to give ourselves as living sacrifices for His name’s sake.