By Dr. D. James Kennedy
Sometimes I am asked why I am a Presbyterian. Since there are many other
denominations to which a person could belong, this is a legitimate
question. Why are you a Presbyterian? How sound are your reasons? I am a
Presbyterian because I believe Presbyterianism to be the clearest form
of church government modeled in Scripture and also what many people call
Calvinism to be the purest expression of the Bible’s doctrine. Some
people say, "Why do we have to have doctrines or creeds at all?" They
announce, "No doctrine but the Bible, and no creed but Christ." This is
a pleasant motto and sounds spiritual. But when you examine it closely,
it is superficial. We can say we have nothing but the Bible and still be
a great many things. Do not be deceived by simplistic solutions to
difficult problems.
OUR CREED
We believe the Bible to be our only infallible, inerrant standard, given
by inspiration of God himself, revealed by the Holy Spirit through human
authors. No other man-made book stands beside the Bible! But our weak
minds are assisted by having a careful and systematic summary of what
the Bible teaches. A creed states basic beliefs. The Apostles' Creed
states what the early church believed and it acts to unite Christians.
The Presbyterian Church is creedal. We have a written statement of
belief which is called the Westminster Confession of Faith. We need a
creed to be crystal clear to all involved exactly what the church
believes on any particular issue. Our Confession has been agreed upon by
many who are not in the Presbyterian Church, or in any Calvinistic
group, to be the most carefully worked out statement of the doctrines of
Christianity ever made. It was written between 1643 and 1648 in
Westminster, England, by approximately 150 of the most learned divines
of that time; many of these same men translated the King James Bible.
They spent some three million work hours over many months preparing the
Westminster Confession. It is a classic statement of the teachings of
the Bible.
JOHN CALVIN
John Calvin was born in 1509, a Frenchman. He fled from Paris when his
life was threatened. He had written a sermon for the new president of
the University of Paris. The president preached it and was burned at the
stake, therefore the author of the sermon decided it was time to leave
France! On his way to Italy he was stopped by William Farel and
challenged to become leader of the Reformation in Geneva, Switzerland.
Calvin’s work transformed that city into a model city known for peace,
morality, and prosperity. Calvin was the most brilliant theologian of
the Bible, after Augustine in the Fourth century, until his day. Along
with Augustine he ranks as one of the greatest theologians of all
Christian history. John Knox went to Calvin's Geneva to study and came
away inflamed with zeal and passion for the truth of the Scriptures,
then went back to Scotland and took one of the most superstitious,
backward countries in all Europe and absolutely transformed it by the
proclamation of Calvin's doctrines from Scripture. It was from Scotland
that much of Calvin’s Reformation influence would later flow to early
America. According to John Knox, Calvin had made Geneva “the most
perfect school of Christ since the Apostles.”
GRACE
Calvinism is a theology of grace. It is free grace, pure grace, and
total grace. The Bible teaches Christianity is uniquely among all the
world's religions the religion of grace - the totally unmerited favor of
God by which man may be saved. Calvinism is pre-eminently that view of
the New Testament. It is the spirit of the Apostle Paul who was such a
strong defender of the doctrines of grace: “By grace are ye saved “ - by
the totally unmerited favor of God. All other systems of interpreting
the Bible fall short of that. Every one of them inserts human worth,
human merit, human ability, at some place along the way of man's
salvation. So-called Calvinism boldly affirms that salvation is by grace
- totally, completely, finally, from beginning to end, completely of God
and not of man. God is exalted and man is abased. I, along with Charles
Spurgeon (who as a Baptist proclaimed the free and sovereign grace of
God), am happy to say I am a Calvinist who holds to the doctrines of grace.
SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD
Calvinism is the theology of God's sovereignty. All
things have to be seen in the sovereignty of God. God’s grace is
sovereign. He bestows mercy on whom He will and withholds it from those
from whom He will. God is sovereign in all of His workings. God alone is
God. All other systems, at some point, take away the sovereignty of God
and give veto power over the plans of the Almighty to men. Any effort to
take away the sovereignty of God elevates man to the position of God and
abases God, doing great damage to the glory and majesty of the God of
the Scriptures. In all other religions, in one way or another, the God
that is worshipped is a God who does the best He can. He tries but He
fails. He is trying to save the whole world, but He cannot quite do it.
“Poor God...” He just cannot hack it. He is the God who fails. But a
Calvinist knows, God is determined to save His elect and He is perfectly
succeeding in doing just that. The God of the Bible is a God who knows
no such thing as failure. He is the omnipotent, Almighty God who reigns;
the One who does according to His will among the armies of heaven and
the inhabitants of the earth, the One about whom it is said that “no
purpose of His can be restrained.” A lot of people do not like a God who
is truly sovereign. They want God to be a slightly larger version of
themselves, with all of their foibles and failures. That is not the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Calvinists do not claim to
understand all the deep mystery of Bible doctrines relating to God’s
sovereignty, such as election, and predestination. There is much we
admit our minds cannot comprehend; but that is why God is God and we are
not. We find these things taught in the New Testament and we refuse to
sweep them aside in our own arrogance to re-interpret God in our image.
Nor are we arrogant or proud in finding ourselves to be recipients of
God’s saving grace. Just the opposite - nothing more humbles a person
than to realize the wonders of divine grace!
MISSIONS
Calvinism is pre-eminently missionaryoriented. Not only do Calvinists
believe in a sovereign God, but they also believe we are to yield
ourselves in obedience to the command of this God to fulfill the great
commission to take the Savior’s gospel into the whole world. There are
some who find a discrepancy here. They think you have to deny one idea
or the other. But the Bible maintains both: God knows his elect from all
eternity, yet each person must hear the gospel and respond to Christ in
personal faith, as the Holy Spirit regenerates his will to be able to
believe. God does not save people fatalistically, or in a vacuum apart
from gospel preaching. It is interesting to note that the modern
missionary activity of the church of Jesus Christ has been predominantly
a Calvinistic enterprise. The modern missionary movement of the past 200
years began with William Carey in the late 1700's. This cobbler who
worked upon shoes had a map of the world above him. He looked at that
map day after day, month after month. His heart went out to the lost,
and God called him to go to India with the gospel. This man was a
Calvinist of the strictest order. He formed the London Missionary
Society, and every person in that society and every missionary that went
out was a thorough going Calvinist. Whether it be William Carey, David
Livingstone, or David Brainerd, or the powerful evangelist George
Whitefield, the missionary rolls read like Who's Who in Calvinism.
BIBLE STUDY
Calvinism is pre-eminently Biblical. When I was doing graduate work in
New Testament, my professor of Greek, a thorough-going Arminian,
(Arminianism emphasizes the power of the human will) said he had to
confess that 95 percent of all the best commentaries written on the New
Testament or the whole Bible have been written by Calvinists. John
Calvin himself was a thorough-going scholar of the Bible. Having
examined every word in every text in the original language of the Holy
Scripture, Calvin endeavored to bring the teachings and government of
the church into line with God’s Word. He wrote many detailed
commentaries on most of the Bible, filling up a good-sized shelf, which
are still used today by scholars and preachers. His several volume work,
Institutes of the Christian Religion is regarded as the most masterful
doctrinal summary to come out of the Reformation. Just as Luther was the
firebrand to ignite reform, Calvin was the brilliant mind God used to
help systematize its teachings. Calvinism is called “Reformed Faith”
because of the insistence that every doctrine must be brought into line
with Scripture or reformed according to the Word of God. Traditions of
men and mere practical expediency will not do!
CIVIL GOVERNMENT
Calvin moved outside the purely theological realm to affect life in
other ways. In the church as an institution, he taught a form of
government which was a representative, constitutional republic, in which
representative elders from the congregation rule the church body. Also
in the state Calvin was a constitutionalist. James I of England, as a
monarch, knew this well when he said, "Presbyterianism agreeth with
monarchy like God with the devil." French historian Alexis de
Tocqueville came to America in its beginning and examined our ways. He
said that because Calvin exalted one sovereign above all else and
humbled all other sovereigns beneath Him, all concepts of divine right
of kings or infallible decrees of popes could not endure before the
awful majesty of the sovereign God. So it was that personal freedom and
representative, constitutional, republican government came to America,
largely by influence of various Calvinists.
ROOTS OF AMERICA
The passengers on the Mayflower called Pilgrims were Calvinists of the
strictest order. They stated while they were on the Mayflower that they
were in complete agreement with the church in Amsterdam, Holland, which
they had left and which was a Dutch Calvinist church. So also were
thousands of English Puritans who followed later into Massachusetts.
According to historians there were three million Americans at the time
of the Revolution. Of these, 900,000 were Scotch Irish Presbyterians,
600,000 were English Puritans, and 400,000 German or Dutch Reformed.
Two-thirds of the colonists were Calvinists in background at least. This
greatly influenced all their ways of thinking The American historian
Bancroft, said the American Revolution, so far as it was affected by
religion, was a Presbyterian movement. One zealot wrote King George
saying, "I fix all the blame for these extraordinary proceedings upon
the Presbyterians." Prime Minister William Pitt, upon receiving word of
the revolution back in England, rose in the House of Lords and uttered
these famous words, "Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian
parson." He meant John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the
Declaration of Independence, president of Princeton at that time. It is
also interesting to note that when the British surrendered at Yorktown,
all of Gen. Washington’s colonels (the commissioned officers of the
American Army) except one, were actually Presbyterian elders. Is all
this mere coincidence?
EDUCATION
Because God is sovereign and Christians must live so as to prepare
ourselves to give an account to God, one of the things necessary,
according to Calvin, is that people must be taught to read, so they may
explore the Scriptures. Everywhere Calvinists went there was great
stress on literacy and education in general. This is the difference
between the illiterate condition that South America found itself in and
the more widespread literacy of North America. The great early
universities of this country, such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,
Dartmouth and others were founded by the strictest of Calvinists. Yale
was primarily a school for Calvinistic ministers, as was Princeton.
These schools have long since been choked by the weeds of liberalism.
ECONOMICS
Calvin also brought to light the free enterprise and capitalism we have
now in America. He has been called the founder of capitalism by social
scholars Max Weber and Ernest Troeltsch who both lay all the blame on
the doorstep of Calvin. We accept the blame! We feel capitalism,
whatever its faults, has proved to be a system which has provided the
most economic benefit for the most people of any system in the world.
Calvin also, with the Biblical concept of the sovereignty of God, and
man as a creation of God owing an accountability of stewardship, felt
that private property is guaranteed by the ten Commandments and also
free enterprise was essential, in order that man may be able to work out
his own stewardship and give an account to God. A saved man must have
the responsibility of proving himself faithful and diligent with
whatever God had given him. This is utterly contrary to modern
socialism. Those who had wealth and position were to exercise it as a
stewardship from God. They have in a sense, the same responsibility as a
civil magistrate, to exercise their office and powers for the good of
others. Wealth was not to be hoarded. Charity was encouraged, though the
deliberately idle were not to be encouraged in their sloth. All work
could and should be done to God’s glory. Calvin, when he died, owned
practically nothing at all, since he had given away large sums of money
to help others. He refused to have even his name placed on his
tombstone. Years later, people added the initials “JC” on a small stone
which lies flat on the ground, and which took us half an hour to find in
Geneva. In the midst of grand statues of men on horseback, lies the
remains of this man whose heart beat with but one great thought -“of
Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things, to whom be glory now
and forever more!”
—From the Christian Observer June 16, 1989
