Calvinist Comeback?

Calvinism was once virtually the American Faith. It came to New England with the Puritans, to New York with the Dutch Reformed, to Pennsylvania with the German Reformed. And wherever Scottish Presbyterians went in the U.S., predestination, 90-minute sermons, and the "Shorter Catechism" went with them.

But the faith of ascetic, heretic-burning John Calvin was stern, hard and alien to a boisterous young country in a nature-taming age. Calvinism insisted on 1) the total depravity of man, 2) a God who, for His own good reasons, irrevocably divided all mankind into the Elect and the Damned, 3) strict "blue laws."-

Is Calvinism's stern faith on its way back--as a reaction against the emotional confusions of war, inflation and the atomic age? Sure of it, Professor Clarence Bouma, of Michigan's Calvin Seminary, writes in the current Journal of Religion:

". . . The once dominant and self-confident liberalism speaks a different language today. Horton and Van Dusen, Tillich and Niebuhr, Fosdick and Morrison--it scarcely makes a difference to whom you turn. All speak in the same apologetic strain, even though a few try to cover their retreat. . . .

"These liberals no longer speak of the perfectibility of man. . . . Whereas we used to hear of the glory, the progress, and the greatness of man, we now hear of his 'fate' and his 'predicament.'. . . What has all this to do with a possible revival of Calvinism?

"First of all, this new temper is a vindication--whatever the intent of the liberals--of the Pauline-Augustinian-Calvinistic view of human nature. . . .

"The message of Calvinism to modern man is that he must repent from his idolatry, which is his greatest and root sin. His idolatry, in that he has made a God of himself and made a problem of the living God of the Scriptures. . . .

"We have had enough religion, religious philosophy and religious psychology. It is time we again found the living God and began to build the theological temple. . . .

"Let theology be theology! We have made everything of it except just that. Theology is the coherent, systematic study of God and divine things. . . . Somehow modern theology will have to find the road back to the God of the Scriptures, the God of whom Pascal in his spiritual autobiography is reported to have exclaimed in the night of his conversion: 'God! the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! The God of Jesus Christ! Not the God of the philosophers and the scholars!'':

*In Geneva under Calvin (1541-64), joking and absence from sermons were crimes.

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