On Sept 14 Rachel Held Evans, a young author awaiting the publication of her first book from Zondervans posted “Why Calvinism Makes Me Cry” on her blog. There are a number of her comments that I’d like to respond to and use them to as a backdrop to role out some more recent thoughts of my own. I’m going to keep this piece separate from the larger issues I want to deal with. It’s probably the least important of what I want to say.

It was suggested that perhaps some of what she was objecting to was better attributed to “hyper-Calvinists” rather than “Calvinists”. She said, “Folks are always telling me that my problem is with hyper-Calvinism, not Calvinism…but I guess I’m having trouble making a clear distinction. I usually counter with, “hyper-Calvinists are just consistent Calvinists,”

Traditions are communities that travel through time. There are two important aspects to that definition: the “communities” aspect and the “time” aspect. First on “communities”

People sometimes self-identify with communities, sometimes they are identified with communities by someone else. Sometimes the entire community is identified by people who don’t want to be identified with it. Given all of this the questions of definition, whose in and whose out is always a matter of debate.

When you add to this the 4th dimension, time, the labeling gets even more difficult. When we want to talk about “Calvinism” one of the definitions we must immediately wrestle with is “who was John Calvin and what really did he believe?” Given the fact that Calvin wrote and published books, we might imagine that this isn’t a difficult task. Anyone who imagines this has never been around historians. The answer to the question “who was John Calvin and what did he think” continues to be worked on.

This doesn’t mean that everything is relative, but it does mean that there are degrees of precision required for a discussion. Part of what we also know is that John Calvin himself is not a static target. He like many of us had thoughts and ideas that evolved, and the specific language he used to address one thing may have differed according to whom and when he was addressing a person or a topic. In other words, there are things we can say with great certainty and precision about John Calvin, as well as things we can say with less precision.

When it comes to describing a trans-historical community described under the label of “Calvinism”, the complexity of the task expands exponentially. What aspect of Calvin’s work or thought defines this community? Would Calvin have seen that aspect as crucial or are we to rely on the opinions of later followers and which followers?

Since traditions are communities are made up of people, we also expect that there will be ranges of ideas over which they will disagree and debate. Some will debate what Calvin thought about something, others will simply agree with him on many things and disagree on others.

Often the hypothetical exercise of asking “what would Calvin think of such and such today” comes into play. I don’t deny that this can be a helpful thought experiment but it is a highly speculative one. Calvin’s thought and language were part of his world. We have the benefit of knowing something of his world, but he never had the benefit of knowing anything of ours. Truth is, without the limitations of his limited historical existence Calvin simply would have been John Calvin. Introduce a translation of Huxley’s “Brave New World” into the French of Calvin’s day to Calvin and quite possibly we would not have the same Calvin. If Calvin traveled to our world quite likely we wouldn’t want to take him to the beach. If we traveled to Calvin’s world quite likely he shouldn’t to take us to the meat market or the doctor.

Part of what this time warp does to communities is a rather scary thing that keeps historians in work. We understand elements of his world through approximate translations into our world and we start to work with them. Now that is a wonderful thing because what it allows is for us to think thoughts that we likely would not think if we couldn’t do this sort of literary traveling back into time. It allowed Calvin to acquire Augustine and the writings of Paul. It allowed Bavinck to acquire the writings of Calvin and Augustine and do his own work, and on we go. That’s a terrific thing. If we don’t commune with people from the past within a tradition, we are unconscious prisoners of the moment. This gift, however, comes at a price. The Calvin we commune with is our Calvin to a degree and not his own. Competent scholars will always wrestle with this, hopefully within the context of a broader community working on the same thing, and often the details are or only seem irrelevant to others not as familiar with the deep workings of the thought, but it is important nevertheless. Again, this is the work of the historian, to continue to better understand the person within their past context in order to make as accurate a thought translation to the present as possible.

Within these communities with all of this complexity we will have a rich diversity of thinking. Jonathan Edwards was a Calvinist, but he was not Calvin. Bavinck and Kuyper were Calvinists, but they were not Calvin. They differed with Calvin on some things, and not on others. Together the form a tradition acceptably labeled by many, but not always by all.