This is true according to Time Magazine. Time has cataloged the top ’10 Ideas that are changing the world’ for next week’s cover story and they listed, uhem, the ‘New Calvinism’ at number 3!
Here’s the rest of the list:
1. Jobs Are the New Assets
2. Recycling the Suburbs
3. The New Calvinism
4. Reinstating the Interstate
5. Amortality
6. Africa, Business Destination
7. The Rent-a-Country
8. Biobanks
9. Survival Stores
10. Ecological Intelligence
According to Time:
Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin’s 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism’s buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism’s latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination’s logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time’s dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.
Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don’t operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, “everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world” – with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle’s pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom’s hottest links.
If I were Mark Driscoll I probably would not be down with having a disqualifying sin for eldership be used as an adjective to describe me (cf. 1 Tim. 3.3). At the end of the day, God is sovereign, even over such things as this article. As he always says, “just something to pray about.”
I am glad that they list Piper, Mohler, the ESV Study Bible and Justin Taylor’s blog. I think that we will look back one day at these times and praise God for his wisdom, kindness and grace in putting such good resources in our hands to fuel and sustain God-centered growth.
Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures for the movement’s doctrinal drift, but can’t offer the same blanket assurance. “A lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness, divorce, drugs or sexual temptation,” says Collin Hansen, author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists. “They have plenty of friends: what they need is a God.” Mohler says, “The moment someone begins to define God’s [being or actions] biblically, that person is drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist.”
I tried not to quote the whole article, but it was difficult. Here is the rest of it.
It is exciting today that God is causing folks to notice the impact of the gospel through the church and into the community. Publicity is good if it brings people into the tent and causes a gospel centered revival. Wouldn’t it be great if the new evangelical fad was the gospel?
At the same time I know that it is not going to be cool to be a Calvinist forever. In fact, the reaction to this will probably be people going overboard and sullying the name, confusing the issues and a subsequent swing away from doctrine. However things go, I am convinced that this is the truth of God and that it should be trumpeted with passion, humility, clarity, and regularity. May God be pleased to continue to open a door for the Word (Col. 4.3).
