Quotes About Calvinism

“The doctrines known as Calvinism are not something that emerged late in church history, but rather are that which takes its origins in the teachings of Jesus.1 -James Montgomery Boice”

— Steven J. Lawson

“I believe we best say yes to God's glory and sovereignty by saying no to Calvinism.”

— Austin Fischer

“So I have also tried to be honest. And the best way I have found to be honest is to tell you my story: a journey in and out of Calvinism. As Chesterton once confessed, sometimes you have to be egotistical if you want to be sincere.3 In this reminiscing, something became”

— Austin Fischer

“I don't feel safe around anything when Jesus is not the Lord of it. Calvinism without Jesus is deadly; it's fatalism, it's simply Islam. We need Jesus. When the precious doctrines [of Calvinism] are used to perpetuate gloom, severity, introspection, accusations, morbidity, slander, gnat-stringing, and more, the soul is not safe.”

— Douglas Wilson

“Calvinism is an all-embracing system of principles ... It is rooted in a form of religion which was peculiarly its own, and form that specific religious consciousness there was developed first a particular theology, then a special church-order, and then a given form for political and social life.”

— Abraham Kuyper

“Lutheranism restricted itself to an exclusively ecclesiastical and theological character, while Calvinism put its impress in and outside the church upon every aspect of human life.”

— Abraham Kuyper

“The domain of Calvinism is indeed far broader than the narrow confessional interpretation would lead us to suppose.”

— Abraham Kuyper

“Calvinism, in comparison, appears to be more closely related to the hard legalism and the active enterprise of bourgeois-capitalistic entrepreneurs. Finally,”

— Max Weber

“Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was-by Time corporate standards-just a little lazy.”

— David Halberstam

“I was raised as a Calvinist, which is doctrine-driven. And though there are many things wrong with Calvinism, you are at least encouraged to argue about things.”

— Paul Schrader

“As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased.”

— Ralph Adams Cram

“On Pilgrim's Progress: I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“I think what Calvinism may offer us is that God's in charge of his world.”

— George Carey

“In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.”

— Chaim Potok

“My Calvinism persuades me that we are open to God, in the sense that we are not delimited, not organisms with fixed attributes in the manner of the other creatures, but are instead participants in a reality that utterly exceeds our powers of description.”

— Marilynne Robinson

“He offered a crystal-clear notion of right and wrong, an unambiguous definition of good and evil. And although his perspective was absolutist and unyielding, it presented a kinder, gentler alternative to Calvinism, which had been the ecclesiastical status quo in the early years of the American republic.”

— Jon Krakauer

“What lay at the bottom of their savagery, of course, was their idiotic belief in Calvinism-beyond question the most brutal and barbaric theology ever subscribed to by mortal man, whether in or out of the African bush.”

— H.L. Mencken

“In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived, or rather a specified recognition of it. She desired this birthright; something definite to reject. It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged. In some ways the most real and rooted people whom Sandy knew were Miss Gaunt and the Kerr sisters who made no evasions about their believe that Gold had planned for practically everybody before they were born an nasty surprise when they died. Later, when Sandy read John Calvin, she found that although popular conceptions of Calvinism were sometimes mistaken, in this particular there was no mistake, indeed it was but a mild understanding of the case, he having made it God's pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous since of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier.”

— Muriel Spark

“Western democracies exalt the ideal of social equality, but our economic system arguably emerged from 16th-century Calvinism, a religion whose members believed that God showed favor by bestowing wealth and other forms of success on what they called 'the chosen.'”

— Martha Beck

“Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.”

— David Halberstam

“There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same.”

— Hilaire Belloc

“I have my own private opinion that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and Him crucified, unless we preach what nowadays is called Calvinism. It is a nickname to call it Calvinism; Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else.”

— Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“It [Calvinism] established a religion without a prelate, a government without a king.”

— George Bancroft

“As time went by we developed a sort of ideology without ever formulating it as such. I've always said that we are documenting the sacred buildings of Calvinism. Calvinism rejects all forms of art and therefore never developed its own architecture. The buildings we photograph originate directly from this purely economical thinking.”

— Bernd Becher

“To suggest that the merciful, longsuffering, gracious and loving God of the Bible would invent a dreadful doctrine like Calvinism, which would have us believe it is an act of 'grace' to select only certain people for heaven and, by exclusion, others for hell, comes perilously close to blasphemy.”

— Tim LaHaye

“Calvinism that does not humble has missed its mark.”

— Walter J Chantry

“Calvinism emphasizes divine sovereignty and free grace; Arminianism emphasizes human responsibility. The one restricts the saving grace to the elect; the other extends it to all men on the condition of faith. Both are right in what they assert; both are wrong in what they deny. If one important truth is pressed to the exclusion of another truth of equal importance, it becomes an error, and loses its hold upon the conscience. The Bible gives us a theology which is more human than Calvinism and more divine than Arminianism, and more Christian than either of them.”

— Philip Schaff

“Reformed theology so far transcends the mere five points of Calvinism that it is an entire worldview.”

— R.C. Sproul

“Indifference to all the refinements of life
it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Calvinism is the consistent endeavor to acknowledge the Creator as the Lord, working all things after the counsel of His will.”

— J.I. Packer

“One of the best introductions to the history and ideas of Calvinism, packed with insight and wisdom.”

— Alister E. McGrath

“In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject.”

— Paul Tillich

“Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“Let us ... once and forever put an end to that lie which says that Calvinism and an interest in evangelism are not comparable.”

— George Whitefield

“It is no novelty, then, that I am preaching; no new doctrine. I love to proclaim these strong old doctrines, that are called by nickname Calvinism, but which are surely and verily the revealed truth of God as it is in Christ Jesus.”

— Charles Spurgeon

“To me, Calvinism means the placing of the eternal God at the head of all things.”

— Charles Spurgeon

“Calvinism did not spring from Calvin. We believe that it sprang from the great Founder of all truth.”

— Charles Spurgeon