Calvinism: History, Branches, Critics and an Alternative

Calvinism is the Reformed Protestant system of theology that descends from John Calvin (1509–1564) and the Swiss Reformation, and it places God's sovereignty at the center of creation, providence and salvation. The system runs from Zwingli's Zurich and Calvin's Geneva through the confessions of Dort and Westminster, it has grown several branches, and it has drawn critics from each of the other major Christian traditions for four centuries. Its five points, set out against the Remonstrants at the Synod of Dort, are the best-known part of a much larger body of doctrine. Calvinism is right about God's side of salvation, and its critics are right about the creature's side. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, set beside Arminianism and Molinism below, keeps both.

Key takeaways

• Calvinism is a whole system. Its center is God's sovereign decree, carried by confessions from Heidelberg (1563) to Westminster (1646) and expressed in covenant theology, Reformed worship and church order.
• The tradition has several branches. Amyraldism, hyper-Calvinism, neo-Calvinism, the New Calvinism and the Reformed Baptists each grew from a question the confessions left open.
• The critics press two points hardest. Arminian, Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox critics hold that God sincerely wills all to be saved, and that reprobation sits badly with that will.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism keeps exhaustive sovereignty and libertarian freedom. Set beside Arminianism and Molinism, it says "sovereignty" from God's frame and "freedom" from ours, and the standing contradiction dissolves.

Calvinism in brief

Calvinism is the name most people use for the theology of the Reformed churches, the branch of the Protestant Reformation that took its lead from Zurich and Geneva. The tradition itself prefers the name Reformed theology, and with some reason. The label "Calvinism" was first used by opposing Lutherans in the 1550s, and Calvin did not approve of it. The system was the work of many hands, and Calvin was the most influential of them.

At its center stands the conviction that God is sovereign over all He has made, and that Scripture is the only rule by which His will is known. Predestination belongs to that center, but it is one expression of the conviction and a smaller part of the system than its reputation suggests. A Reformed church is marked just as much by its covenant theology, its preaching, its sacraments and its government by elders. Its adherents read the whole of life as lived before a God who rules it.

Readers who want the short answer before the long one will find a plain-language introduction in a companion article.

Where did Calvinism come from?

The Reformed tradition began a generation before Calvin. In 1519 Huldrych Zwingli became the people's priest of the Grossmünster in Zurich and began to preach reform of the Catholic Church from Scripture. A first wave of reformers worked alongside him or in parallel: Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito in Strasbourg, John Oecolampadius in Basel, Guillaume Farel in the French-speaking cities. They shared a stress on the priority of Scripture, a covenantal reading of baptism and the Lord's Supper, and a doctrine of unconditional election. Zwingli died at the battle of Kappel in 1531. A second wave carried the work on: Calvin, Bullinger, Peter Martyr Vermigli and, in England, Thomas Cranmer.

Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) succeeded Zwingli in Zurich and co-authored the Helvetic Confessions. In 1549 Bullinger and Calvin agreed the Consensus Tigurinus, which brought Zurich and Geneva to one statement on the Lord's Supper and closed the gap that had opened between Zwingli's followers and Calvin's. That agreement gave the young movement a stability that let it spread.

John Calvin was born in Noyon, France, in 1509. In March 1536 he published the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion in Basel, and later that year Farel persuaded him to stay in Geneva. The city council expelled them both, and after a period in Strasbourg Calvin returned to Geneva on 13 September 1541, where he worked until his death in 1564. He revised the Institutes across his life. The 1539 edition expanded the treatment of election and reprobation, and the final Latin edition of 1559 recast the work into four books and eighty chapters.

From Geneva the movement reached the Palatinate, the Netherlands, France, where its adherents were called Huguenots, and Scotland through John Knox. English Puritans carried it to New England, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century missions carried it much further. South Korea now has, by one count, about 20,000 Presbyterian congregations with nine to ten million members. A 2011 Pew estimate put Presbyterian and Reformed Christians at about 7% of the world's Protestants, roughly 56 million people.

The Reformed confessions

Calvinism is a confessional tradition. Its churches define themselves by written confessions adopted in synod, and the major ones remain in use today.

The Belgic Confession was drafted in 1559 by Guido de Brès. The Heidelberg Catechism was published in 1563, and the Dutch Reformed synod of 1571 adopted both as standards.

The Canons of Dort came next, and they are the documents most often meant when people speak of Calvinism's doctrines of grace. After the death of Jacobus Arminius, his followers set out five articles of disagreement in the Remonstrance of 1610. The Synod of Dort met in Dordrecht from 13 November 1618 to 9 May 1619, with voting delegates from Reformed churches abroad, and answered each article. Belgic, Heidelberg and Dort together form the Three Forms of Unity of the Dutch Reformed churches.

The Westminster Confession of Faith was drawn up by the Westminster Assembly in 1646 and became the standard for Presbyterians throughout the English-speaking world. English Congregationalists adapted it in the Savoy Declaration (1658), and Particular Baptists drew on both for the Second London Confession of 1689. Its chapter on the decree opens with a sentence its critics should read in full:

"God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established." (Westminster Confession 3.1)

The theology: sovereignty, covenant and grace

The Reformed doctrine of God begins with His decree. Calvin defined the doctrine in the Institutes (3.21.5) in words that set the terms for the debate that followed: "By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man." The text Reformed theologians return to most often is Paul's:

"In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will." (Ephesians 1:11, NIV)

The confessions draw the consequence on both sides. Westminster teaches that "some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death" (3.3), and that the rest of mankind God was pleased "to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of his glorious justice" (3.7). Reformed theologians have disagreed over the logical order of these decrees. Supralapsarians place the decree of election before the decree to permit the Fall; infralapsarians place it after, and Dort sided with the infralapsarians.

Alongside the decree runs covenant theology, sometimes called federal theology. God first bound Adam in a covenant of works, promising life on condition of perfect obedience, and Adam broke it as the representative head of the race. After the Fall God made a covenant of grace, offering salvation on condition of faith, administered differently across the Old and New Testaments and one in substance throughout. Karl Barth later set aside the covenant of works, while conservative Reformed churches still confess it.

The confessions insist that the decree establishes the created order it governs. Westminster teaches that although all things come to pass "immutably, and infallibly" in relation to the first cause, God orders them to fall out "according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently" (5.2). The paradigm case is the cross, as Peter preached it at Pentecost:

"This man was handed over to you by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross." (Acts 2:23, NIV)

One event, one plan of God, and human agents who are held to account for what they did. The Reformed claim is that both halves of that verse are true without remainder.

Volume One of the Many Beings Framework takes up divine sovereignty and human freedom from the ground up, and it is free to download.

The five points of Calvinism in one section

The best-known summary of Calvinist soteriology is TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace and perseverance of the saints. The five points are popularly said to summarise the Canons of Dort, because Dort answered the five articles of the Remonstrants point by point. The acronym itself is much later. It appears as early as about 1905 and was popularised by David Steele and Curtis Thomas in their 1963 booklet, and some Reformed scholars hold that its wording is a poor summary of the Canons.

Each point carries Scripture on its side, and each carries a standing objection with Scripture on its side too. A one-sentence gloss on each would be unfair to both, and each point already has its own full treatment on this site. The article on the five points sets out each doctrine, its strongest objection and how the two relate, and a separate article treats total depravity, the first point, in depth.

For this page it is enough to say where the five points sit. They are Calvinism's answer to the question of who accomplishes salvation and how securely, and they rest on the doctrine of the decree described above.

Worship, sacraments and church order

Reformed worship follows what is called the regulative principle: the church may include in public worship what God has instituted in Scripture, and the rest is excluded. On that basis many early Reformed churches sang only the Psalms and used no instruments. Since the nineteenth century many Reformed churches have treated instruments and hymns as circumstances of worship left to biblical wisdom.

The Reformed churches recognise two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, which Westminster describes as signs and seals of the covenant of grace. Infants of believers are baptised as members of the covenant community, a practice the Reformed Baptists reject. On the Supper the tradition stands between Luther and Zwingli. The Marburg Colloquy of October 1529 failed to reconcile the two on the presence of Christ's body and blood, and Calvin's settled view, which Westminster confesses, is that Christ's body and blood are "spiritually, present to the faith of believers" in the ordinance.

Church government is the most visible Reformed mark in many countries. Presbyterian churches are ruled by elders gathered in sessions, presbyteries and assemblies, the pattern John Knox brought from Geneva to the Church of Scotland. Congregational churches place authority in the local congregation, and some Reformed Anglicans kept bishops.

The branches of Calvinism

The branches of Calvinism are best understood by the question each one answers, because each grew where the confessions left room for disagreement.

Amyraldism answers the question of the atonement's extent. Moses Amyraut and the School of Saumur taught that God decreed Christ's atonement for all alike on condition of faith, and then, seeing that none would believe on their own, elected those He would bring to faith. The view is also called hypothetical universalism, and teachings of this kind appear in Bullinger and several of the theologians who signed the Canons of Dort. B. B. Warfield called it "an inconsistent and therefore unstable form of Calvinism." Amyraut rejected Arminianism outright, and his system stands closer to Lutheranism, which likewise teaches a universal atonement and a limited election. Its defenders answer Warfield that it keeps unconditional election while doing justice to the texts that speak of Christ dying for the world.

Hyper-Calvinism grew out of a dispute over the gospel offer, and historic Calvinism rejects its answer. It denies that all people have a duty to repent and believe, and so hesitates to offer Christ to all. It arose among some eighteenth-century English Particular Baptists associated with John Gill and Joseph Hussey, and was opposed by Andrew Fuller and the missionary William Carey. The label is often thrown at anyone the speaker finds too strict, which makes it worth using with care.

Neo-Calvinism answers the question of culture. Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck led it in the Netherlands from the late nineteenth century, and Kuyper gave its rallying cry: "there is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'" His Stone Lectures at Princeton in 1898 gave the movement its first wide hearing in North America.

The New Calvinism is a movement of evangelical renewal. It gathered around conferences such as Together for the Gospel (2006) and figures such as John Piper and Al Mohler, and in March 2009 Time named it one of its 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now. Confessional Reformed critics fault it for holding the doctrines of grace while loosening covenant theology and confessional practice.

Reformed Baptists part from the other branches over baptism. They take the older name Particular Baptists from the doctrine of particular redemption, distinguishing themselves from the General Baptists, whose soteriology is Arminian. They hold Reformed soteriology and practise believer's baptism, confessing the First (1644) and Second (1689) London Confessions, and Charles Spurgeon is among their best-known preachers.

Calvinism at its strongest

Calvinism is strongest where it stays closest to the text. When Paul faces the charge that election makes God unjust, he holds election in place:

"What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.' It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God's mercy." (Romans 9:14–16, NIV)

The Calvinist reads this as it stands, and the reading has weight. If salvation turns finally on a human decision, the saved have something to boast of that the lost lack, and Scripture leaves the believer no ground for boasting. If salvation turns on God's purpose, the believer's security rests on the one foundation that cannot move. That is why Reformed Christians speak of predestination as a comfort before they speak of it as a puzzle. Westminster closes its chapter on the decree by commending the doctrine as a source of humility, diligence and consolation to those who sincerely obey the gospel.

The system is also more careful than its caricature. The Canons of Dort insist that regenerating grace "does not act in people as if they were blocks and stones; nor does it abolish the will and its properties or coerce a reluctant will by force." They teach that "all who are called through the gospel are called earnestly," and that Christ's death is "of infinite value and worth, more than sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world." Reformed theology affirms a sovereign God, a willing creature and a sincere offer, and asks the critic which of the three he would give up.

The critics of Calvinism

The critics of Calvinism come from each of the other major Christian traditions, and the strongest of them press on real texts.

The Arminian and Wesleyan critique is the oldest and closest. The Remonstrants held that election rests on God's foreknowledge of faith, that Christ died for all, and that grace can be resisted. Prevenient grace, grace given to all that frees the will to respond, carries their account of how a fallen will can answer. John Wesley, preaching "Free Grace" at Bristol in 1740, refused the gentler vocabulary of the Reformed: "Call it therefore by whatever name you please, election, preterition, predestination, or reprobation, it comes in the end to the same thing." The text Arminians set against the decree is Paul's own:

"This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth." (1 Timothy 2:3–4, NIV)

Roger Olson's Against Calvinism (2011) restates the case for this generation.

The Lutheran critique shares Calvinism's insistence on salvation by grace alone and parts company on election. The Formula of Concord teaches that predestination "extends only over the godly," and it rejects the teaching "that God is unwilling that every one should be saved." Lutherans also dispute Reformed Christology and the Supper; the phrase extra Calvinisticum, for the Reformed teaching that the eternal Son is present beyond His human nature, was coined by Lutheran scholastics around 1620.

The Catholic critique was set down at the Council of Trent. In its sixth session (1547) the council condemned the claim that the will moved by God "cannot refuse its consent, if it would," and condemned the teaching that grace is given only to the predestined while others are "predestined unto evil." Catholic theology keeps its own Augustinian and Thomist account of predestination, and when the long dispute between Dominicans and Jesuits over grace was closed in 1607, each order was left free to defend its view.

Orthodox theology gave its answer in 1672, when the Synod of Jerusalem replied to a Calvinist confession published under the name of Cyril Lucaris. Its third decree grounds predestination in God's foreknowledge of how each person would use free will, because God "would have all men to be saved."

The moral objection gathers these together and presses them on reprobation. A God able to save all who passes some by for the display of His justice appears to contradict His own declared desire:

"For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live!" (Ezekiel 18:32, NIV)

The Reformed reply is firm. Dort holds that the decree of reprobation "does not at all make God the author of sin (a blasphemous thought!)," and Westminster says the non-elect are ordained to wrath "for their sin." Calvin faced the difficulty openly; he called the decree "dreadful" (Institutes 3.23.7). The objection still stands at full strength: a decree that settles the outcome before the creature acts seems to leave the sincere offer and the divine lament without an object.

Volume Two, Resolving the Problem of Evil, takes up how God's goodness and the reality of evil stand together.

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism: sovereignty and freedom both kept

Each of the main alternatives to Calvinism keeps something by giving something up. Arminianism keeps the creature's freedom and the sincerity of the offer by grounding election in foreseen faith, and the Reformed reply is that the decree now waits on the creature. Molinism keeps both sovereignty and freedom by giving God middle knowledge of what free creatures would do in any circumstance, and its critics ask what grounds those truths. Classical compatibilism keeps the decree by counting a choice free when it flows uncoerced from the agent's own desires, and its critics answer that such an agent had one possible choice. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT), the position of the Many Beings Framework, holds that both can be kept, because the dilemma arises from a word used in two senses.

The framework holds that there is one reality, known by knowers whose natures differ in kind. God's perceptual frame is atemporal, simple and self-existent: He knows and wills the whole of history in one eternal act. The human frame is sequential, composite and contingent: we meet that same reality one moment at a time. Terms whose content involves time, possibility, agency, freedom or value are said of God and of us analogically, truly of both and in different senses. The Many Beings Fallacy is treating such a term as if it meant the same thing in both frames. Isaiah marks the distance:

"'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the Lord. 'As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.'" (Isaiah 55:8–9, NIV)

Apply that to the debate over the decree. "Sovereignty" said from God's frame is the one eternal decree that comprehends all that comes to pass, affirmed here as Westminster confesses it. "Freedom" said from our frame is a real capacity to choose between open alternatives within a finite life, undetermined by prior finite causes, and the framework affirms it with Wesley. The word that turns these into rivals is "before." To say God settled the outcome before we chose is to place His act on our timeline, and His act belongs to eternity. Election remains the eternal ground of the believer's faith, prior to that faith in order, with no date on our calendar. So the framework holds divine sovereignty and libertarian freedom together.

The same index reaches reprobation. From God's frame, justice concerns final states, and the judgment of the lost is just. In time, God deals with the world in patience and a genuine desire that each person repent. His decree permits the finite order and governs its ends, and the sinful refusal originates in the creature's own finite choice. Westminster's "pass by" and Ezekiel's "Repent and live" then describe one reality from two frames.

A Calvinist will say libertarian freedom makes the decree depend on the creature. The framework answers that dependence is a temporal relation said from our frame, and the decree comprehends the creature's choice without waiting on it. An Arminian will say the lost are still passed by. The framework answers that the passing by and the sincere offer are both true of one reality, and each stands whole.

A philosopher will say this is two truths, or compatibilism under a new name. The framework holds one reality and one truth about it, and it keeps an indeterminism compatibilism denies. It holds that the index is grounded in the difference between Creator and creature, and that claim is the one on which the position stands or falls. Volume One makes that argument in full, and Frame-Indexed Classical Theism is set out on its own page.

Volume One shows each step of the argument; get it free.

Frequently asked questions

Is Calvinism biblical?

Calvinism is built from Scripture, and its texts are real: Ephesians 1 on election, Romans 9 on mercy, John 6 on those the Father gives the Son. Its critics also argue from Scripture, and their texts are just as real: 1 Timothy 2:4 on God's desire that all be saved, Ezekiel 18:32, and the warnings of Hebrews. The honest question is how both sets of texts fit together. Calvinism answers by subordinating the second set to the first, Arminianism by the reverse, and Frame-Indexed Classical Theism by reading each set from its own frame.

Is Calvinism the same as Reformed theology?

Largely, yes. "Reformed theology" is the tradition's own name, and "Calvinism" is the popular one, first used by Lutheran opponents. Reformed theology is broader than the doctrines of grace. It includes covenant theology, the regulative principle of worship, a Reformed view of the sacraments and presbyterian or congregational government. Some Baptists hold the doctrines of grace without infant baptism, and some confessional Reformed theologians count them Reformed in soteriology while hesitating to call them fully Reformed.

What is hyper-Calvinism?

Hyper-Calvinism is the view that the gospel should be offered only to those who show signs of election, because the non-elect have no duty to repent and believe. It grew among some eighteenth-century English Particular Baptists and was opposed by Andrew Fuller and William Carey. Historic Calvinism rejects it: Dort teaches that all who are called through the gospel are called earnestly. The term is also used loosely as an insult.

What is the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism?

Calvinism holds that election is unconditional, grounded in God's will alone, and that grace given to the elect effectively brings them to faith. Arminianism holds that election rests on God's foreknowledge of faith, that Christ died for all, and that grace can be resisted. The two systems met formally at the Synod of Dort, which answered the Remonstrance of 1610 article by article. The article on TULIP sets the five points beside their Arminian objections one by one.

Does Calvinism make God the author of sin?

The Reformed confessions deny it in the strongest terms. Westminster says God "neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin," and Dort calls the thought blasphemous. Arminian critics answer that a decree ordaining whatsoever comes to pass must include sin, whatever the confession says. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds that the decree comprehends the finite order from God's frame while sinful choices originate in the creature's finite freedom, so the denial stands.

Where to go from here

The Reformed tradition and its critics have spent four centuries guarding truths the other side needed. The Reformed have held that God rules all things and saves by grace alone, and they are right. Their critics have held that God's offer is sincere and that the creature's refusal is its own, and they are right too. The dispute lasted because both sides assumed the key words meant one thing on either side of the Creator and the creature.

Volume One of the Many Beings Framework argues the alternative from first principles and can be downloaded free. The five points article carries the same reading through TULIP, and the series takes it on through evil, time and divine changelessness.

Related reading

• Limited Atonement
• Irresistible Grace
• What Is the Unforgivable Sin? Scripture, Views, and Fear