The Great Calvinist Reawakening

According to The New York Times, a Calvinist revival is sweeping through modern American evangelicalism. Among the evidence: church libraries are filling up with books by Reformed preachers like Mark Driscoll and John Piper; many evangelical preachers are talking more about Scripture and sin; the Southern Baptist Convention has formed a “Calvinism Advisory Committee” to deal with allegations of pro- and anti-Calvinist prejudice; and a grad student at Notre Dame is writing a dissertation on the “new Calvinism.”

This proof of Reformed revitalization is persuasive, and it echoes other proclamations about the importance of this retro-chic religious movement, including a TIME piece in 2009 proclaiming “the New Calvinism” to be one of the “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.” Clearly a heightened emphasis on doctrine and God’s predestining power is appealing to many. But the new Calvinist revival—which amounts to a partial shift in theological emphasis and style—is a far cry from the Calvinist revival that burned through the Northeast a few centuries ago during the Great Awakening. In churches just a couple miles from where I’m writing this essay in New Haven, and in other towns for hundreds of miles around, men and women were once caught up in controversial and unmanageable ecstasies. They wept, they trembled, they flushed, they fell senseless to the ground. They sang at the top of their lungs and threw their worldliest possessions on bonfires. They writhed with the shame of sin, and shook with the power of salvation, and fainted with the sweetness of the grace and glory of God.