Two Thoughts In One

DeYoung, Duncan, Mohler: What's New About the New Calvinism from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.

I'm not a Calvinist, and I don't think anyone should be. Paul would be horrified to know that anyone's identity as a Christian is wrapped up in a human being other than Jesus of Nazareth, be it Calvin, Luther, Arminius, Apollos, or even Paul himself.

There will be strong objections to the above paragraph, but I think much of them will rely on a devastatingly false presupposition: That Christian unity is acheived through shared doctrine. If this presupposition were true, then it makes perfect sense for us to label robust bodies of doctrine and identify ourselves with one of them. That would be the most effective way of making people feel united to something. But if this is the kind of unity that we crave, then we of all people are to be most pitied.

I say this not to destroy the importance of shared doctrine. That would make me an idiot. So what am I trying to get it?

If you watched the video clip, did you notice anything missing? 

Consider this small body of doctrine:

...salvation is accomplished by the sovereign grace of God, operating through the death of Jesus Christ in our place and on our behalf, and appropriated through faith alone.

The person who wrote this says that there is not one syllable in this summary that he disagrees with, and I imagine all three of the men featured above would say the same. "But there is something missing", the author goes on to say. Worringly, this something -- or someone -- is actually the source of real Christian unity: the spirit.

Christian unity is a unity of the spirit. And for all of popular Calvinism's talk of "robust" theologies, there is a death-dealing dearth of spirit language that undermines the whole. It is as if a group of people have been given 1959 Gibson Les Paul's, the value of which they know, but with the problem being that they don't actually know how to play the guitar.

Calvinism -- though I question the term itself -- isn't the problem. The problem is with how it is played.

Mohler, Duncan and DeYoung may be right in what they say about the New Calvinism. But I think they are blind to other factors involved in Calvinism's resurgence. Modern Calvinism has embraced a term floated around quite a bit in Irish politics recently - knowledge economy. In this economy, information is power, information is product, information is prestige. He (and I use the masculine deliberately) who can answer the most questions wins.

In short, this is not merely a "religious" movement. There are political, economic, social, theological, philosophical and psychological factors involved that need to be examined. That in itself is okay. Christianity should touch all of these spheres. But it is my hunch that when these factors are examined, Calvinism, like many other expressions of Christianity, will find that the gospel is not being allowed to grow holistically; its light is not being shone on the dark forces at work in our world.

N.T. Wright says that "you can't simply add the spirit on at the end of the equation and hope it will still have the same shape". The spirit not only calls into question what we know, but also calls into question how we know what we know and how we use what we know. Unity goes deeper than shared doctrine. It is a Spiritual thing that finds its expression not only in knowlege but in love.