Tim Challies just posted his notes from a talk by Dr. R. Albert Mohler. The topic was the legacy of John Calvin as a preacher & teacher. Follow this link to read it for yourself: Ligonier Conference – Al Mohler
Calvin understood the majesty of preaching because he understood the majesty of God. Calvin’s mode of preaching was verse-by-verse, book-by-book so he would not selectively avoid things he did not wish to teach. In this way God’s people receive all that they need and not just what the preacher determines the people need. The preacher is neither to add nor subtract from Scripture.
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Well and good that Calvin went book by book, verse by verse, but at the very church the Mohlers attend, he is the *only* one to teach or preach expositorily (through his own unquestionably first-rate Sunday school class, or as his church calls its Sunday school now, “adult Bible fellowship,” emphasis on fellowship, meaning social events like swim parties and game nights are the priority). The pastors there, including the head of all their branch banks, rarely preach expositorily, Sunday school teachers other Al have explicit marching orders not to go too deep doctrinally, and Al is the only teacher at his branch who’s expository or even close to it. The rest routinely skip big chunks of the Bible that they’re afraid the big cheese in charge will consider too controversial, particularly including–you got it–anything that’s Calvinistic, since Dr. Ezell is *not* a Calvinist, by his own account. So just watch with a bit of amazement or even wry amusement the recent efforts by Southern’s president to try to Calvinize more Kentucky Baptist churches (which are, despite recent shifts in power that are by no means altogether bad, still autonomous local Baptist bodies of Christ and do not answer to either the national SBC or to Southern Seminary). If Al were really so gung-ho about Calvin–who is hardly inerrant, who among other things advocated infant “baptism” and loathed the separation-of-church -and-state liberty for which Baptists are famous and was in fact a Geneva terrorist when it came to persecuting Baptist forerunners–if Al really were going to make Saint Calvin the “hill to die on” doctrinally, shouldn’t he start with Highview East in his own backyard before he tries to force all of the other Baptist churches to swallow JC hook, line and sinker and lead a new generation of Baptist seminarians to ardently, even stridently, push JC as the only way? (Just as the recent champion of pumping membership rolls by marrying young and having lots of kids whether or not you are mature enough and financially stable enough to do a good job did, in point of fact, stop at having just two kids, had them *after* he was out of seminary and relied heavily on a nanny to help raise them. It was most certainly his right to do it precisely that way, and his kids turned out great–probably because he DID do it that way–but that’s just not something you hear about in discussions of Southern’s newly found “multiply like rabbits” neo-Catholic theology of procreative prowess popularized during their ex-Boyce dean’s ribald pulpit boasts about arrows in his own mighty quiver leading to his own huge family. Well done, good and faithful servants! Now go apply for your food stamps while you live on Lexington Road and try to raise a bunch of kids you can’t afford.)
Jim, wow. Just wow, Jim. Wow.
.-= Darby Livingston´s last blog ..A Scalpel or a Sword: Surgery or Slaughter? =-.
What an ad hominem attack Jim. As a brother in Christ, you should be ashamed of yourself.
A Baptist distinctive you’re completely missing is the liberty of conscience. There is room in the SBC for Calvinists and non-Calvinists. There always have and there always will.
Instead of slinging cannonballs at those we don’t agree with, we should seek to try to build bridges of fellowship with them.
What happened at Southern is nothing short of a miracle, that Christ once again became Lord over the campus. I did my MDiv there and stand on the shoulders of men like Dr. Mohler who battled liberalism, a filthy press in Louisville, and his own students to stand for Scripture.
I do not agree with every tenet of Calvinism, but I consider myself very Reformed. Yes Calvin had his issues, and we certainly cannot agree with him on every point of doctrine. But then again, who can we say that about? I have never understood how Calvin could be paedobaptist. But to call him a terrorist is misrepresentation at best and slander at worst.
I admonish you as a brother in Christ to stop pointing the finger at someone else’s ministry, and stop using your anti-Calvinist ax as a club to beat a godly man with.
@Jim – Good grief.
@Tony – Thanks for the link. I missed it when Tim posted it.
.-= Barry Wallace´s last blog ..Gianna Jessen and Jonah: Two lessons in God’s sovereignty =-.
Whether or not you agree with Jim’s tone, our brother’s comments are, to my knowledge, all quite accurate–including his praise of Mohler for being a fine teacher at an otherwise bland congregation. Jim’s historical references to Calvin’s decidedly un-Christian behavior to anyone who dared to oppose him are similarly on target.
Any master of divinity student at any seminary studies church history from Justo Gonzalez, and if you go to p. 67 of vol. 2 of Gonzalez’s universally respected Story of Christianity, you will read how Calvin got a prominent physician executed in Geneva for daring to suggest that “the union of church and state after Constantine’s conversion was in truth a great apostasy….he was arrested and Calvin prepared a list of thirty-eight accusations against him….Servetus was burned to death–although Calvin had argued in favor of a less cruel death by beheading.” Such a kind humanitarian, that he would want to murder someone by “only” beheading him and not burning him alive. And this was over the issue of church and state, on which the 2009 theocrats of talk radio still are taking an radically anti-Baptist position by blithely ignoring “my kingdom is not of this world.”
Dr. Wellington was not, in point of fact, “slandering” the patron saint of Lexington Avenue–”by your fruits you will know them,” the Bible says, and Calvin’s “fruit” included murder. Not to mention blowing it on baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
Here’s the question, guys. The turnaround of Southern Seminary under Al Mohler started out as the SBC’s democratic way of reflecting a strong majority consensus that Southern had gotten out of hand in the matter of biblical inerrancy (which I, too, believe in, by the way). But is there really now a similar SBC-wide mandate to saturate Southern’s curriculum with Puritanism from top to bottom? No, there is not! The rationale for Al’s firing of universalist Molly Marshall was valid; she was not in step with the wishes of the vast majority of the SBC. But if the overall SBC is now not rabidly Calvinist, what right do academics at Southern have to go against the overall grain of their denomination by blindly following the Butcher of Geneva? Marshall was academically arrogant for flouting the beliefs of the overall SBC…but Southern’s new gung-ho Calvinists are not? Hmmmmm…….
There are a whole lot of fine Kentucky Baptist churches that are anything but liberal that happen to see a very fine seminary’s recent obsession with Calvinism as being highly divisive and simply won’t even consider hiring recent seminary graduates for that reason alone–because they have chosen to be Baptist churches, not Presbyeterian churches. If you want to be a Presby, fine, and we’ll see y’all in heaven, but please don’t mount a crusade to make historically Baptist churches swallow Presby theology hook, line and sinker.
I think you have done your homework on the history of as you call him, the Butcher of Geneva. So, if he had such a prominent role in the city, why was he banished from the city? With the issue of Servetus, you call him a physician but his crime was heresy. He denied the Trinity and was wanted by the Inquisition. Being a man of his time, which we cannot fully understand, Calvin compiled the list of offenses but the prosecution was left to another and the punishment for heresy in that time was death. We cannot read our 21st century mores into a time period we cannot fully understand. It was a capital offense in those days to be a heretic, which sounds so foreign to us but we mustn’t past judgment on a law we cannot understand. If anything, Calvin’s request for beheading was a macabre sense of humanity, similar to our request for lethal injection rather than electrocution for the condemned.
Yes for the life of me I cannot understand how Calvin could baptize babies, but I will also not discredit his overall body of work.
Also, don’t point out character flaws as “by their fruits.” Calvin was a man of his time. We have seen other “men of their time” who held views we look down our noses at. The founders of Southern Seminary were Confederate chaplains, we would look at them in some way as being racist. Martin Luther was a drunk and an anti-Semite with a bad temper. Should we dismiss them for holding views that were common to the age they lived in?
Also, are you suggesting that the founders of Southern Seminary, sent by the messengers of the SBC are Presbyterian because they held to the Doctrines of Grace? Is not George Whitefield also a Baptist? What about CH Spurgeon? How about Isaac Backus, William Carey, and others? Just because someone has a Reformed leaning and theological lens does not make them non-Baptist. You should know well enough that there have always been Calvinists and non-Calvinists in the SBC. What’s more is that Southern is one of six, so it isn’t even a majority of young SBC pastors in training who are being “brainwashed” there.
While I am no fan of John Calvin due precisely to his persecuting practices, and while I hold firmly to Sovereign Grace and know of instances in the first 17 years of the 1500s (before Luther posted his 95 theses), some 35o in England where there were a number prosecuted and persecuted for their holding to things like predestination, I do know that the doctrines of grace are the heritage of the Southern Baptist Convention and Seminary. The man who dreamed the dream and then brough the seminary into existence, Dr.Basil Manly, Sr., was in the words of the First President of Southern, Dr. James Petigru Boyce, “a decided Calvinist.” Manly, Sr., dreamed the dream of a Southwide Seminary for Baptists in the 1830s. He later would serve as President of the Educational Conventions of the Southern Baptist, 1857,158,1859, which brought the Seminary into existence. His son, Basil, Jr., would with the help of Dr. A.M. Poindexter, draw up th Abstract of Principles, which have a relationship with the Sandy Creek Confession of 1816. That Confession was drawn up by a committee chaired by Luther Rice who was present to enlist Sandy Creek’s Separate Baptists in the missionary cause. The Confession is clearly and firmly Sovereign Grace, and one of the members of that committee was the young Basil Manly, (later Sr.) who was the clerk of Sandy Creek that year. Within 10 years he would become the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charleston, S.C., and give his cheerful assent to the “Century Confession” (London Confession of 1689 much like the Philadelphia Confession and based squarely upon the Westminister Confession). His agreement to Sovereign Grace likely began in the Sandy Creek Assn. and in the church in which he was licensed, Rock Springs, which was originally one of the arms of Sandy Creek (in today’s terms, one of the multi-campuses of that great church). James Taylor in the Memoir of Luther Rice refers to his “decided” adherence to what are called the Doctrines of Grace. The church from which the first missionary to China (Matthew T. Yates) came, Mt. Pisgah, had in its abstract of principles that Chist died for the church; it said nothing about Him dying for everyone without exception. However, in the Union of Separates and Regulars of 1787 in VA, the rule was adopted that, “the preaching that Christ tasted death for every man would be no bar to communion,” whih clearly implies that the normal view – even among the Separates as well as the Regulars was that Christ died for the Elect. Dr. Boyce’s Abstract of Theology, the first textbook used at the seminary, is clearly Sovereign Grace in its perspective or calvinistic. In fact of the writings of ministers and teachers and leaders of Southern Baptists in the 1800s, I know of very few who held to anything other than Sovereign Grace. I have a number of works from that period even a number published by Southern Baptists that are very plainly Sovereign Grace on the issue of Salvation. All of the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and of the Southern Baptist Thelogical Seminary were firmly committed to most, if not all, of the doctrines of grace, the one exception, if there was one, allowing for belief in the efficiency-sufficiency view of the atonement from Andrew Fuller. And make no mistake about, Fuller was a Five Point Calvinist as was William Carey and Richard Furman and the John Gano. Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall were Puritans, and their views on Sovereign Grace werenever question. Indeed, everyone seems to forget that the Philadelphia Assn. accepted the associational letters of the Sandy Creek Assn. which means that they were accepted as holding like Faith and Practice. A friend of mine pastored one of the Sandy Creek Churches in Tennessee which in the 1700s had no problem in adopting the Philadelphia Confession of 1742. Now, Dr. Mohler has merely followed in the footsteps of the founders (note small “f” to distinguish them from the present day Founders seeking to follow in the founders footsteps. That theology of Sovereign Grace was the theology of the First and Second Great Awaeknings and of the origins of the the Great Century of Missions. Could it be that we are having a resurgence of that theology, because God is preparing us for the Third Great Awakening, the one which shall win the whole earth in in generation by persuasion of the truth and not by force or manipulation? Many have been praying for such a visitation for more than a quarter of a century, some for even a half of a century. Three things are required for an awakening according to the researches I have done, namely, the presence (as in “an invisible hand operating in the assemblies of the Separates bearing down the human mind,” Morgan Edwards, 1771), the theology, Sovereign Grace, and the humility. All three are admirable summed up in the most popular hymn of all time, Amazing Grace. Sing it, and you sing of the presence, the theology of Sovereign Grace which is what John Newton was seeking to magnify, and the humility as he admitted what a wretch he was. So it seems Dr. Mohler is merely following in the steps of the founders on the issues of Sovereign Grace. If he is, then what is your excuse for not supporting him? After all, the liberal accepting of variance on the atonement began wth the Calvinists of the Separates and the Regulars in Va in 1787. 50 years later a church would be founded in MO based on those principles; it was my privilege to serve them for a brief period in the 60s. Also please noe the freedoms of this nation grew out of a people who were very largely Sovereign Grace/Calvinistic in their views. The State Church, Anglican had Sovereing Grace written in its 33 articles, and it was being preached by people like George Whitefield. An then there were the Presbyterians, represented by no less than John Witherspoon of Princeton at the signing of the Delaration of Independence, the Reformed Churches, the Congregationalists, and the Baptists. The one who signedthe Declaration along with Witherspoon was John Hart (first President of the Continental Congress), a member of the Hopewell Baptist Church which was a member of the Philadelphia Assn. One noted historian called America “a Calvinistic Republic.” And I should also mention John Gano, the last person to address the Continental Army before it was disbanded after the American Revolution. A Moderate Baptist wrote a tract asserting from the evidence he had seen that Gano had baptized George Washington. Hw interesting. And Gano was one of the Sovereign Grace men (he wrote a circular letter for the Philadelphia Assn on Effectual Calling) who helped to bring about the union of Separate and Regular Baptists. He also preached from the same platform with George Whitefield and went to communion with him.
.-= Dr. James Willingham´s last blog ..The Climax of the Reformation =-.
Wow. Who brought up the old post with all the loving comments?
The main obsession I see with Calvinism in the SBC is those who are opposed to it. Doesn’t the fact that Dr. Mohler belongs to the church he does show that he is not one who desires nothing more than to push Calvinism?
.-= iMark Lamprecht´s last blog ..Senator Ted Kennedy Dies at 77 =-.
Thank you Mark. It is encouraging to see someone using reason and logic. Mohler’s pastor is an outspoken non-calvinist. That says enough for me.
The fact that Dr. Mohler is a member where the pastor is a an outspoken noncalvinist reminds me of Basil Manly, Sr., and his refusal to intrude his views upon others, while at the same time he was fully committed to the Doctrines of Grace. It might surprise many, but true liberalism develops in the tradition of Sovereign Grace. Roger Williams was a committed believer in these teachings, and yet he wrote religious liberty into law. I want people to believe like I do, but I want them to come on their own, being fully persuaded by the facts as from the heart of God Himself. Like my friend, Dr. Gene Spurgeon who won a young lady to Christ over 40 years ago, and when he asked her why she responded so readily, she replied, “O, it was so wonderful that I could not resist it.” He thought about it for 40 yrs. and finally came to the conclusion that she was right. That is how I want to win people. I am not like the Evangelist that another friend of mine knew over 50 yrs. ago. The man told a lie to get some people foward, and justified his lie by the fact that they came!!!! Manipulation, lying, etc., really have no place in doing the will of God and in evangelism. Of course, telling the truth will sometimes involve persecution. Only let us not tell it in a way to make it offensive.
.-= Dr. James Willingham´s last blog ..The Climax of the Reformation =-.
“Just as the recent champion of pumping membership rolls by marrying young and having lots of kids whether or not you are mature enough and financially stable enough to do a good job did, in point of fact, stop at having just two kids, had them *after* he was out of seminary.”
You know, it is interesting: if you knew anything about Dr. Mohler, you might have an idea that it’s actually a great blessing he has two kids when the doctors first told he and his wife they would have none.
You go off on several diatribes and through that make a personal attack on the man for an unrelated issue that you know nothing about.
It is shameful and petty; and really makes me not want to take anything else you say seriously.
Thank you Mike! Well said! And his position on that is in response to deliberate childlessness in Christian marriages. The best way to grow the church is 9 months at a time, and raise a godly family that develops into a lifetime of faith.
Scott — Unfortunately, I believe many folks have that same thought you just stated. The truth is, though, that only Christ can grow the church. We can not “birth” a stronger church.
In Christ,
Sallie
.-= Sallie´s last blog ..Home-made Oatmeal Packets =-.
Sallie, am I understanding you right that it’s “unfortunate” for Christian parents to use their families as Gospel ministry fields? And when did I ever imply that was “growing” the church? It’s a simple fact that Christians tend to self-replicate, it’s been a commonality throughout church history
That was the whole point of what I said, that those who raise their children to love Christ (even if they have a Duggar-sized family) have the right to do so and praise God for that
And when did I ever imply that was “growing” the church?
Scott,
Not that I necessarily disagree with your point, but she may have thought you mean that when you said
The best way to grow the church is 9 months at a time
.-= Joe Blackmon´s last blog ..A Christian Response to Health Care Reform pt 2 =-.
A good spirit in disagreements is a matter to be sought and cherished. Oneupsmanship is always an ugly guest in discussing contentious issues. Does anyone really win when they crush their opponent? God has called us to peace,and, above all, Sovereign Grace should make us people of peace.
.-= Dr. James Willingham´s last blog ..The Climax of the Reformation =-.
Ha touché. I think I meant grow numerically and she probably meant conversion growth. My bad on that one! Sorry about that guys