How Revolutionary Liberty Undermined More Than Calvinism

When we attended the 2012 Ligonier Conference, Dr. Robert Godfrey spoke on the damage anti-intellectualism has done to the Christian mind and traced its rise in American history. After the Revolution, the glory of individualism took hold in such a way that "Power went from the snobs to the mobs" in three specific areas - medicine, law, and religion. In The Search for Christian America, the authors also discuss the Revolution's affect on theology, but they get specific with the school that was affected. It was Calvinism.

"The kind of democratic individualism unleashed by the American Revolution altered no dimension of the church more than its theology. Most obvious in the fifty years after the Revolution was the revolt against Calvinism. But most notable was the revolt against the accepted ground rules of theology itself. This second revolt attacked especially the long-standing Christian conviction that it was valuable for an educated segment of the church to remain conversant with the theological traditions of Christianity..."¹

"Just as notions of total depravity did not stand up well to the belief that individual were capable of shaping their own destiny, so "unconditional election" seemed to deny that men were fully capable of determining the course of their own lives. The antidemocratic tendency of the doctrine of election emerged even more clearly in the idea of a "limited atonement," that Christ's death was somehow restricted to those whom God elected to salvation. Similarly, the concept of "irresistible grace" seemed to make God a tyrant of uncontrollable power, just that from which Americans had fought to free themselves. Finally the focus on volitional commitment as the primary human obligation made the idea of the "perseverance of the saints," that we are sustained by the choice of another, irrelevant, if not contradictory. In short, Calvinism was being dropped not in response to theological arguments but because it violated the spirit of Revolutionary liberty...."²

"This revolt meant not just the replacement of an older Calvinist system with a newer Arminian one. It was rather a revolt against theological systems in general, the whole creedal and confessional structure of the church, and the idea of God's truth being mediated by educated theologians."³

Noll, Hatch, and Marsden quote popular preachers of the time who disparaged Calvinism, but it was more than that. There was a failure to see any value for the present in the Christian heritage of the past. Calvinism was just the first of the theological traditions to be abandoned because it happened to be the most prominent at the time. This progressed to the point that it became very common for people to think they could be biblical without being theological.⁴ When I showed those quotes to my daughter, she said, "The mobs have become the snobs," and she's right. It takes a certain level of arrogance to discount the theological labor of generations of believers who have gone before us.

"Whether one regards the erosion of Calvinism in America as good, bad, or indifferent is not the primary issue. The important thing is that an ideology linked to a mythic Revolutionary liberty changed ground rules so drastically that it left the American church cut off from the rich sources of nourishment from the past. In time it meant that American Christians were much less able to express the gospel in all its profundity. In the headlong rush to realize freedom's potential, few Christians in America paused to consider the consequences."⁵

I can't help but wonder - Aren't we reaping those consequences today regarding the Doctrine of God?

1. The Search for Christian America, Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, George M. Marsden, Crossway Books, 1983, pg. 117.
2. Ibid.118. (italics mine)
3. Ibid. 118. (italics mine)
4. Ibid. 118-119 (Not to be disrespectful, but a face-palm gif comes to mind.)
5. Ibid. 119. (italics mine)