The mention of Calvinism may provoke revulsion or comfort—but it rarely produces apathy.
“Calvinism,” journalist H.L. Mencken opined in 1937,
“occupies a place in my cabinet of private horrors but little removed
from that of cannibalism.” Mencken included these words in his obituary
for J. Gresham Machen, a Presbyterian theologian who whispered on his deathbed,
“Isn’t the Reformed faith grand?” The same doctrines that elicited
exultations from the lips of one man incited comparisons to sautéing
your next-door neighbor in another. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us,
then, that the most recent surge of interest in Reformed theology has ignited joy in some hearts and panic in others.
Over the past several years, an overabundance of possible names for
this movement has also sparked no small measure of confusion. “Young,
restless, Reformed” was the nomenclature that Collin Hansen selected for an article and book about his journey with “the new Calvinists”—a group that’s also been dubbed “neo-Reformed,” “neo-Calvinist,” and even “neo-Puritan."
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