ANNOUNCER: What are the different types of Calvinism? How do they differ and why are there different types of Calvinists? Hey, thank you for joining us today. This is Grace in Focus. We’re delighted to have you with us. We are a ministry of the Grace Evangelical Society. You can find us at faithalone.org. At faithalone.org/events, you’ll find a very special regional conference upcoming at the Grace Bible Church in Kamaiah, Idaho, July 19th to the 23rd. That’s almost a whole week, a great place to spend your vacation. It’ll be a combination of Biblical teaching and recreational events. You’ll enjoy it. If you live in that area, you’ll want to attend it, but you could come from just anywhere and have a great time. Fellowship and teaching will be great and so will be the recreation. Find out more about this regional conference at faithalone.org. 

Now with today’s topic of discussion, here are Bob Wilkin and Sam Marr. 

SAM: Welcome, everybody. I’m Sam and I’m here with Bob Wilkin and we’re doing something a little different than our normal format. Rather than doing Q&A, we’re going to do a few episodes on Calvinism, but we’re using this book Bob’s been reading called Whosoever Will, edited by David Allen and Steve Lemke. The book is based on, there’s many authors and it’s from a John 3:16 conference, so it’s all different topics related to Calvinism. 

BOB: And all the authors are either seminary professors in Southern Baptist seminaries or they’re leading Southern Baptist pastors. But this first section we’d like to talk about, and it’ll probably take more than one show is they talk about the fact that there are different types of Calvinism. So the first thing is, let’s talk about Baptists and Calvinism, because they point out that some Southern Baptist are Calvinists in their soteriology, but they’re not Calvinists in their eschatology or their ecclesiology. So for those of you who are not theologians, Sam, we need you to define what some of those terms mean. So what does soteriology mean? 

SAM: Soteriology is the study of salvation or things related to salvation.

BOB: Right. So a person can be a Calvinist in their understanding of how a person is born again. 

SAM: And is that TULIP? 

BOB: That’s TULIP. That’s the five points of Calvinism. In fact, they go through all five points in this book. The book’s called Whosoever Will based on John 3:16 in the King James version. That’s soteriology, but then ecclesiology is what? 

SAM: The study of the Church. 

BOB: Study of the Church. So a person can be a five-point Calvinist and not believe in the Presbyterian model of the church. They can believe that every local church is independent like Baptist churches hold to. And there’s no hierarchy. There’s no synod and no presbytery that’s telling the local churches what they should be doing. And of course, there’s also the issue of the leadership in the local church. Southern Baptist churches typically believe that the pastor is the leader of the church. And you have deacons that help them. But in Presbyterian churches or other Reformed churches, they’re going to have elders in their local churches. And the pastor is going to be reporting to the elders and responsible to the elders. Then there’s the other word I used was there’s eschatology. Now that word is probably more familiar to most people, but what is eschatology? 

SAM: That’s study of the end times. 

BOB: Study of the end times. So you can be a Calvinist in your soteriology on the five points of Calvinism and yet not believe in millennialism, which is the typical view of Calvinists. That is, Calvinists don’t believe there’s going to be a Rapture. They don’t believe in the pre-trib Rapture. They don’t believe in the Tribulation. And they don’t believe in the millennial reign of Christ. They believe the next step is what they call final judgment at the Great White Throne, followed by the kingdom. And so they don’t see a Millennium or a Tribulation or a Rapture. 

So what they’re arguing in this book, which I think is absolutely correct, is that you can be a Calvinist in your understanding of the doctrine of salvation and not a Calvinist in everything else. For example, most people who consider themselves Calvinists in all areas would say that the official councils and decrees of the early church are binding on us today, whereas people who are not Calvinists in all aspects are going to say, no, no, no. The only thing binding on us is Scripture. 

So a friend of mine came up with this explanation, which I think is probably the best way to go. Calvinism refers to your understanding of the doctrine of salvation. Being Reformed means you’re not only a Calvinist in your understanding of soteriology, but you’re a Calvinist in all aspects, so that you it’s probably better to say a person who holds to all aspects of ecclesiology and eschatology and soteriology is a Reformed person. In fact, some churches, we’re going to get into this later, but they’re called Reformed churches, and they specifically buy all of that, whereas if you only believe in the five points, you would be a Calvinist, but not a Reformed person. 

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BOB: And so anyway, in this book, they basically distinguish between different kinds of Calvinists. Now I would like to go a step further, and I would like to suggest that there are two or three different kinds of Calvinists. And now I’m not talking about whether they agree with, like for example, Southern Baptist Calvinists don’t believe in infant baptism, but Reformed people believe in infant baptism. They call it paedobaptism. Southern Baptist believe in baptism by immersion, whereas your Reformed people don’t believe in baptism by immersion. They don’t immerse babies under the water, right? And so there are some significant differences. 

But what I’m talking about here is two major types of Calvinists, the old Calvinists and the new Calvinists. The old Calvinists were people like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield at Old Princeton, or maybe someone like the famous British pastor Charles Haddon Spurgeon. These old Calvinists would not speak of something called initial salvation and final salvation. That’s what new Calvinists talk about. The old Calvinists did not say that final salvation was a prize to be one, like the new Calvinists say. Instead, what they would do is they would say, the old Calvinists, if a person failed to persevere to the end of their life in faith and good works, so they either fell away doctorally or morally or both, they would say such a person proved they were never born again in the first place. You ever hear that view? 

SAM: Right. And the opposite way of saying it is a real believe will persevere until the end. There’s no question that they’ll persevere. You just don’t know whether you’re one of them until you make it or you don’t. 

BOB: Right. That would be your traditional or typical old Calvinist position. You don’t know if you’re one of the elect. You don’t know if Christ died for you. You don’t know if you’re going to persevere. You don’t know if you’ve been given the gift of faith. So you go through life looking at your feelings, which they would call the inner witness of the spirit, your works, which they call it the spirit-wrought works in your life. And the promises in the Bible, and you look at those three things and you say, how likely is it I’m going to persevere? And if you think it’s really likely you’re going to persevere, then you’re more confident, or less confident, but you can’t be sure because all of the old Calvinists and even the new Calvinists say you can’t be sure you’ll persevere because Paul, in 1 Corinthians 9:27 indicated he couldn’t be sure he was going to persevere. And by the way, both the old Calvinists and the new Calvinists look at all the warning passages in the New Testament, and they say, all those warning passages prove we can’t be sure we will persevere, which they’re right. But the difference is both types of Calvinists say, if you don’t persevere, you’re headed for the lake of fire. Now, let’s talk about for a minute the new Calvinists.

SAM: Well I wanted to ask, was Calvin himself in that category or was he a different category of Calvinist.

BOB: Okay. That’s a good question. Calvin did not believe in limited atonement based on my understanding of Calvin’s Institutes. So in my understanding, Calvin wouldn’t be a Calvinist today. 

SAM: Would he have been a four-point?

BOB: He we would have been four-point, but if you’re a five-point Calvinist, most five-point Calvinists don’t consider four-point Calvinists or Amyraldian Calvinists as Calvinists, they call them Arminians. So as a result, I don’t think Calvin would even be a modern Calvinist, but if you were calling him a Calvinist, you’d probably, you’d have to put him under the old Calvinists because he didn’t talk about initial and final salvation. For him, salvation was salvation. He would have said, if someone fell away, they proved they weren’t saved in the first place. So you’re right, Calvin would fall into the old Calvinist. 

Now, new Calvinists would be people like John Piper, and you’ve probably also heard of Tom Schreiner, who’s a professor at Southern Seminary, the leading Southern Baptist Seminary and Ardel Caneday, who’s also a Baptist professor. And they speak of an initial salvation that’s by faith alone, but they define faith as turning from sins, commitment of life, following Christ, and persevering to the end. And then they say there’s a final salvation, which is a prize to be won, and that’s not by faith alone. That’s by faith plus words. And so they will say, final salvation is not something you have yet. So you can’t lose final salvation because you don’t have it. And initial salvation was never designed to be permanent. So you really can’t lose that. You just, you know, don’t press on to get the final salvation. 

You might look at a book called The Race Set Before Us by Schreiner and Caneday. Piper will say, for example, and has said that if you don’t fight lust, you will go to hell. And so that’s very unusual for the old Calvinist. So I think we need to recognize that there are old Calvinists and new Calvinists in terms of soteriology. And the people I’ve been mentioning here, both old and new Calvinists, well, at least the everybody but Spurgeon, they all would have been Reformed. So maybe next time we can look at major Calvinists denominations today and just talk about where would you find this today? What denominations would be Calvinist denominations? 

And remember, keep grace in focus. 

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On our next episode: what are the major Calvinist denominations? Come back and join us for that. And in the meantime, let’s keep grace in focus.