What is New Calvinism?

Back in 2009, Time Magazine called New Calvinism one of the 10 ideas changing the world. Many think Calvinism is something that is a new concept but what many don't realize that it has been around for many years. It was not until recently gained new supporters.

So what exactly is New Calvinism? Josh Buice wrote:

First of all, the New Calvinism isn’t all that new. This is a movement that’s relatively young in terms of church history, but it’s not a new movement in recent years. In 2008, Collin Hansen published a book titled: Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinistsand in doing so, coined the phrase Young, Restless, Reformed. In the following year, Time Magazine published a series of articles beneath the umbrella of “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.” The third article in the series was written by David Van Biema titled, “The New Calvinism.” In his article, Biema writes:

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.

In terms of the movement – the New Calvinism is very fluid and difficult to fully define. It’s hard to get your hands around the entire movement, especially since the group is no longer explicitly young and not completely restless. Although a difficult task, it is my goal to provide a working definition of the New Calvinism that goes beyond the mere descriptive cliché that’s often thrown around in blogs, books, and sermons.

You can read the entire post here.

Josh also did an interview with the Regular Reformed Guys on New Calvinism that I invite you to check out.

Also Tim Challies gave us 12 features of new Calvinism:

1. The New Calvinism, in its allegiance to the inerrancy of the Bible, embraces the biblical truths behind the five points of Calvinism (TULIP), while having an aversion to using the acronym (or any other systematic packaging) along with a sometimes-qualified embrace of Limited Atonement. The focus is on Calvinistic soteriology but not to the exclusion or the appreciation of the broader scope of Calvin’s vision.

2. The New Calvinism embraces the sovereignty of God in salvation and all the affairs of life and history, including evil and suffering.

3. The New Calvinism has a strong complementarian flavor (as opposed to egalitarian) with an emphasis on the flourishing of men and women in relationships where men embrace a call to robust, humble, Christ-like servant-leadership.

4. The New Calvinism leans toward being culture-affirming, as opposed to culture-denying, while holding fast to some very culturally-alien positions on issues like same-sex practice and abortion.

5. The New Calvinism embraces the essential place of the local church: it is led mainly by pastors; it has a vibrant church-planting bent; it produces widely-sung worship music; and it exalts the preached Word as central to the work of God both locally and globally.

6. The New Calvinism is aggressively mission-driven, including missional impact on social evils, evangelistic impact on personal networks, and missionary impact on the unreached peoples of the world.

7. The New Calvinism is inter-denominational, with a strong (some would say oxymoronic) Baptistic element.

8. The New Calvinism includes both charismatics and non-charismatics.

9. The New Calvinism places a priority on pietism or piety in the Puritan vein, with an emphasis on the essential role of the affections in Christian living, while esteeming the life of the mind and being very productive in it, and embracing the value of serious scholarship.

10. The New Calvinism is vibrantly engaged in publishing books, and, even more remarkably, in the world of the Internet, with hundreds of energetic bloggers and social media activists, with Twitter as the increasingly-default way of signalling things new and old that should be noticed and read.

11. The New Calvinism is international in scope, multi-ethnic in expression, and culturally-diverse. There is no single geographic, racial, cultural, governing center. There are no officers, no organization, nor any loose affiliation that would encompass the whole. (As an aside, he adds: I would dare say there are outcroppings of this movement that no one in this room has ever heard of.)

12. The New Calvinism is robustly gospel-centered, cross-centered, with dozens of books rolling off the presses coming at the gospel from every conceivable angle and applying it to all areas of life, with a commitment to seeing the historic doctrine of justification finding its fruit in sanctification both personally and communally.

Recommended Reading:

The Joy of Calvinism by Greg Forster

Killing Calvinism by Greg Dutcher