In the first two decades of this century, we witnessed a significant resurgence of Calvinism. In recalling this, we can admit that it is probably for the good that the frenzied publicity of the first decade has faded. That was the era in which New York Times writer, Molly Worthen, focused on one particular “new Calvinist” leader in a story with the eye-catching title, “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?”¹Molly Worthen, “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?,” New York Times, 6 January 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11punk-t.html Only weeks later, Time magazine announced to its readers that this same “new Calvinism” was one of the ten forces most directly shaping the world.²David Van Biema, “Ten Ideas Changing the World Right Now: The New Calvinism,” Time, 12 March 2009, https://tinyurl.com/3c6rpcsv. While Time’s curiosity was friendlier, journalist David Van Biema’s evaluation of this movement was nevertheless inexact. In trying to explain the origins of this modern resurgence, his article leap-frogged from Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening era to John Piper; it implied that in-between times Calvinism had been pretty-well off the stage.

Yet the problem displayed by these journalists is, on closer examination, also the problem which has handicapped writers with obvious affinity to today’s Calvinist resurgence. They, too, have attempted to account for this resurgence by looking back. The purpose of this essay is two-fold: (1) to illustrate that evangelical Christians across the English-speaking world have a somewhat clouded understanding of how modern Calvinism has emerged, and (2) to point towards a superior explanation of the fortunes of Calvinism across the last century.

Mainstream journalists and their evangelical counterparts have agreed upon at least one idea, that is, the common assumption that Calvinism—whether considered chiefly to revolve around an insistence on the sovereignty of God in salvation (this emphasis can be designated “soteriological Calvinism”) or to involve a conformity to and transmission of the doctrinal summaries (catechisms and confessions) of the Reformation era (designated “confessional Calvinism”)—was languishing until it underwent recovery in recent decades.³The two expressions of Calvinism named, soteriological and confessional, are featured here because they are the strands of Calvinism which have attempted to interpret the resurgence. There is a third expression, “cultural Calvinism” (the application of Reformation principles to society, the arts, and politics) which has not been so directly involved. Let us survey some attempts at explaining the origins of resurgent Calvinism, beginning with the most recent attempts from within the movement.

1. Post-2000 Explanations

First in a Christianity Today article of September 2006, “Young, Restless and Reformed,” and subsequently in a fascinating book of the same name, Collin Hansen led the way in this kind of investigation.⁴Collin Hansen, “Young, Restless, Reformed,” CT (September 2006): 32–38, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2006/09/young-restless-reformed/; Hansen, Young, Restless and Reformed: A Journey through the New Calvinism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008). Witnessing a resurgence of Calvinism while a college student provoked Hansen to ask questions about where this resurgence had come from; two ideas emerged. First, it did not come via Grand Rapids (home of traditionally Calvinist publishers and a university and seminary bearing Calvin’s name), or via Philadelphia (in whose suburbs stands Westminster Theological Seminary); the influence of such traditional strongholds he designated as “quarantined.”⁵Hansen, Young, Restless and Reformed, 19. It is important, however, to note an acknowledgement of the influence of R. C. Sproul (1939–2017), the Presbyterian theologian associated with Ligonier Ministries (p. 40). In this connection, Tim Challies and Josh Byers presented “a visual history” of “The New Calvinism,” https://s3.amazonaws.com/Challies_VisualTheology/new-calvinism-timeline.html. Second, it had something to do with a growing familiarity with the reprinting and sale of theological books authored during the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.⁶Hansen’s observations of what he found in the bookstore maintained by the Bethlehem Baptist Church of Minneapolis are highly suggestive (Young, Restless and Reformed, 34). The two ideas, when taken in combination, go some distance towards explaining the character of the “new Calvinism” that Hansen witnessed in various American cities: this is a movement driven by theological convictions transmitted not so much through existing Christian denominations or institutions but through literature—and more often than not, literature from a bygone age.⁷Hansen returned to assessing the state of the “new Calvinist” movement in “Still Young, Restless, and Reformed? The New Calvinists at 10,” 9Marks, 5 February 2019, https://www.9marks.org/article/still-young-restless-and-reformed-the-new-calvinists-at-10/.

In the same years, a Scottish writer, the late John J. Murray (1934–2020), was asking similar questions. Yet his concern was not to explain the emergence of the “new Calvinism” then blossoming in North America but to explain the re-emergence of a more traditional conservative evangelical Calvinism, which he believed to have originated in the United Kingdom in the post-World War II period. This, according to Murray, was a story extensively centering around Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981), successor to G. Campbell Morgan (1863–1945) at London’s Westminster Chapel. Having been exposed to the writings of the late B. B. Warfield (1851–1921) in Toronto in 1932,⁸The story of this encounter with Warfield’s writings, while in Toronto, is provided in Iain H. Murray, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years 1899–1939 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth,1982), 285–86. Lloyd-Jones (already a conservative evangelical) became a kind of an engine driving a recovery of Reformed theology in Britain and the wider English-speaking world. Lloyd-Jones encouraged the republication of classic theological books upholding the Reformed theological tradition and later lent his support to those who founded the Banner of Truth magazine and range of publications.⁹For example, Lloyd-Jones took the initiative in seeking to have Calvin’s Institutes republished in the U.K. in 1949. He lent his own edition to the publisher, James Clarke, for reproduction. Iain H. Murray, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith 1939–1981 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1990), 194–95. In the constellation of others associated with Lloyd-Jones in this resurgence in his preaching and publication ministry stood the Anglo-Canadian Anglican theologian, J. I. Packer (1926–2020), and the Scottish-American Presbyterian theologian, John Murray (1898–1975), for so long associated with Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia. Deep in the background lay J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) and the Princeton theology. That seminary had experienced an administrative re-organization in 1929, followed by the withdrawal of some of its leading conservative professors in order to found an alternative seminary.¹⁰John J. Murray, Catch the Vision: Roots of the Reformed Recovery (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2007). Murray offers interesting information about how the writings of the Princeton theologians circulated in the UK in the 1930’s and 1940’s through the agency of the Evangelical Bookshop, Belfast (pp. 40–43).

John J. Murray’s focus was primarily upon the United Kingdom and almost entirely upon a generation of leaders whose greatest influence had been exerted after 1950. For these churchly Calvinists, the Reformed faith had been in serious eclipse in denominations claiming Reformation roots but was now experiencing a definite resurgence. Though a “new Calvinist” counterpart to that which was arising in the USA was also arising in the United Kingdom in these same years, one could never have guessed this by reading Murray’s Catch the Vision. UK parallels to the American “new Calvinism” were not explored. This book was out to establish a “line of succession” regarding who were the true leaders of post-World War II Calvinism.¹¹An interesting smaller book, emerging from the same constituency reflected in Catch the Vision, was the title, The New Calvinism Considered (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2013). Author Jeremy Walker, standing within the succession highlighted by John J. Murray, worked to highlight the excesses of the other, newer movement. See also the stimulating Evangelical Library lecture of Robert W. Oliver, A Glorious Heritage: The Recovery of the Reformed Faith in Twentieth Century England (London: Evangelical Library, 1997). Any developments not emanating from this succession held little interest for John J. Murray. In sum, we have observed attempts to account for two distinguishable Calvinist recoveries, recoveries which—though both benefitting by the same reprinted literature—seem to have been at pains to differentiate themselves from the other.

2. Post-1970 Explanations

What will be the effect of our pressing this same question of the roots of recent Calvinist resurgence among representatives of an earlier generation? James M. Boice (1938–2000), long the pastor in Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, laid out his opinions in a Christianity Today article in March 1975. The Boice-initiated Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology was then anticipating its second meeting—after a gratifying first conference in 1974. As Boice surveyed the American religious landscape, he saw vital signs of life. The Philadelphia conferences themselves had drawn support from a conservative movement (Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns) within his own United Presbyterian Church USA,¹²Fellow UPCUSA conservatives, John Gerstner (1914–1996) and R. C. Sproul (1913–2017) were participants in the early PCRT events. and not only Presbyterians but also Anglicans and Conservative Baptists were featured as conference speakers.¹³It is significant that in the earliest PCRT conferences, cross-town Westminster Seminary played no role whatsoever. Prominent early participants were Church of England evangelicals, J. I. Packer and John Stott. The Conservative Baptist Ralph Kuiper was an early participant as was the theologian-pastor associated with Dallas Theological Seminary, S. Lewis Johnson. Writing for Christianity Today, Boice saw clear evidence of growth. In addition to the Calvinist enterprises centered in Grand Rapids (which he characterized as “holding”), he observed numerical growth in the recently founded Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, and at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. He noted that nearby Westminster Theological Seminary had just recruited its largest intake of new students in years.¹⁴Westminster Seminary was not involved in the early PCRT conferences; they were hosted by a congregation (Tenth) and an organization (Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns) still within the mainline. Boice foresaw a robust future for Reformed theology in the USA. He was contemplating a movement that would re-orient churches after a period of doctrinal indecision and weak teaching.¹⁵James M. Boice, “Is the Reformed Faith Being Rediscovered?,” CT (March 1975): 12–14.

3. Post-1950 Expectations

However, less than twenty years before, fellow United Presbyterian, John Gerstner (1914–1996) had observed a much bleaker landscape as he surveyed the American religious scene. Writing for Christianity Today in 1959, he addressed the question, “What are the status and prospects of Calvinism in the United States four centuries after the release of Calvin’s last edition of the Institutes?” Gerstner replied in somber tones: “They are not good. In fact, they are very, very bad.” Reflecting his opposition to the absorption of his own denomination (the United Presbyterian Church) into the larger Presbyterian Church, USA, in 1958, Gerstner argued that ecumenical theology (which papered over doctrinal differences) and neo-orthodoxy (which, while professing to uphold the Reformation, re-interpreted it) were making the maintaining of the classic Reformed faith highly difficult.¹⁶John Gerstner, “Calvinism: Four Centuries After,” CT (January 1959): 9–12. It is not exaggerating matters to say that in 1959 Gerstner felt that Calvinism had been shunted to the margins.¹⁷It is significant that Gerstner’s perspective was as somber as it was since he was a participant in the trans-denominational American Calvinistic Conferences described below and (later) was a featured speaker in the Boice-led Philadelphia Conferences.

Two Americans (both Baptists) collaborated in 1963 to publish The Five Points of Calvinism: Defined, Defended, Documented. Their work, as much as any other, popularized the widespread use of the acronym TULIP, which has since been demonstrated to be only of early twentieth century origin.¹⁸On Steele and Thomas and the TULIP device, see Kenneth J. Stewart, “The Points of Calvinism: Retrospect and Prospect,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 26.2 (2008): 187–203. The 1963 book represents thinking about Calvinism that is more or less disconnected from ongoing research; it is a Calvinism existing on the margins of Protestantism, moving against a current which is at least indifferent. In the same era the British Particular Baptist writer, Ben Warburton, wrote from a vantage point akin to that of Steele and Thomas (who quoted him with approval). In his 1955 work, Calvinism: Its History and Basic Principles, Warburton wrote in the face of an attitude which supposed Calvinism to be “truly obsolete and worn out.”¹⁹Ben A. Warburton, Calvinism: Its History and Basic Principles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955). The work had first appeared in a much more modest edition, entitled Calvinism: Historically and Doctrinally Considered (London: Farncombe, 1913): 12. Like our early twenty-first century Calvinist narrators, such mid-century writers shared the perception that Calvinism had sunk very low and been shunted to the margins of church and society. They foresaw no immediate prospect of Calvinism undergoing a resurgence of one kind or another.

4. The Pre-1950 Scene

It would be natural to assume that the somber outlook which we have found displayed in the 1950 s (but which is overcome by the 1970s) prevailed also before 1950. After all, did not the theological decline which John Gerstner and others found so discouraging exist before 1950 as well as at the time of their writing? Yet the evidence that we will bring forward suggests a very different picture. We will consider it in three respects.

4.1. The Continuing Resilience of the Princeton Theology at Princeton

For too long a mythology has circulated that from the departure of J. Gresham Machen and his circle from Princeton for Philadelphia in 1929, the vaunted “Princeton theology,” a kind of “gold standard” of conservative evangelical and Reformed orthodoxy across the English-speaking world, was eclipsed at Princeton. The Princeton theology is widely accepted to have found its new home in the seminary founded by Machen at Philadelphia.²⁰From the start, there were also sharp discontinuities between the new seminary at Philadelphia and the old at Princeton. This was so most noticeably in the field of apologetics, but it was true also in the marked deference paid to the Dutch Reformed theological tradition. The proportion of faculty members from this branch of the Reformed family ran much higher, from the start, in Philadelphia than in Princeton. This view of things was popularized in a 1940 book by Edwin Rian, entitled The Presbyterian Conflict, and it has received modern expression in an article published as recently as 1980 in the Journal of Presbyterian History.²¹Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict, reprint ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992); John Hart, “Princeton Theological Seminary: The Reorganization of 1929,” Journal of Presbyterian History 58.2 (1980): 124–40. In fact the majority of the Princeton Seminary faculty, Calvinists all, remained in place.

Among the continuing faculty were Charles Erdman (1866–1960) in Pastoral Theology, Frederick Loetscher Sr. (1875–1966) in Church History, William Park Armstrong (1874–1944) in New Testament, Caspar Wistar Hodge Jr. (1870–1937) in Theology, and Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949) in Biblical Theology. All these experienced educators remained at their posts and trained many students, some of whom would be their eventual successors. The one appointed seminary president in 1936, John A. Mackay (1889–1983) had been a pupil of B. B. Warfield at the time of his graduation in 1915. The church historian at Princeton between 1941 and 1974, Lefferts A. Loetscher (1904–1981), was a 1925 graduate of the seminary who returned to acquire the ThM in 1928.²²James H. Moorhead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 451–52. Bruce Metzger (1914–2007), a graduate of 1938, eventually succeeded his teacher, William Park Armstrong, in New Testament. Armstrong had earlier been the mentor of Machen. It was not simply that Princeton continued in an essentially conservative stance through the employing of its own pre-1929 graduates. In the year of the reorganization (1929), Princeton Seminary appointed as professor of Missions and the History of Religion Samuel Zwemer (1867–1952), the renowned missionary to the Muslim world. The beloved teacher of homiletics and pastoral theology, Andrew W. Blackwood, joined the faculty in that same critical year. When the theologian, John Murray left the Princeton faculty after a one-year appointment and followed Gresham Machen to Philadelphia in 1930, his place on the faculty was filled by John Kuizenga (1867–1949), a conservative Reformed Church in America theologian from Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. From 1940, Kuizenga would fill the Charles Hodge Chair of Theology.²³“Kuizenga, John” in Dictionary of the Presbyterian and Reformed Tradition in America, ed. D. G. Hart and Mark Noll (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R: 1999), 139. Thus, for a decade or more beyond the reorganization of 1929, the theological stance of Princeton’s faculty was extensively as it had been previously.²⁴See the implications of this fact as interpreted by James H. Moorehead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 422. The appointment of Kuizenga, a theological conservative in 1930, was noted as significant by the New York Times of May 7, 1930. With this fact established, a number of tangential developments can be seen in proper perspective. These have to do with the fact that Princeton graduates from the decades prior to 1929 were themselves propagating their understanding of the Reformed faith far and wide.

4.2. Notable Pre-1929 Seminary Alumni

Gerrit Verkuyl (1872–1967), a 1904 graduate of the seminary, had gone on to gain a PhD in New Testament at Leipzig before returning to the USA to direct the Christian education division of his denomination, the PCUSA. We remember him today for the project he undertook in his retirement, the Berkeley modern language version of the New Testament (released in 1945).²⁵This version was intended as an alternative to the then-in-process Revised Standard Version. The Grand Rapids publisher, Zondervan, took on the Berkeley version and provided Verkuyl with a team who produced a contemporary version of the Old Testament, with the finished product being named the Modern Language Bible. F. F. Bruce, The English Bible (London: Lutterworth, 1961), 220. Bruce termed the effort “a more conservative counterpart to the R.S.V.” (p. 221). Since 1926, the 1915 graduate of Princeton Seminary, Louis Berkhof, had been professor of dogmatics in the seminary of the Christian Reformed Church, Calvin Seminary, Grand Rapids. Beginning in 1932 he released, in three parts, what would eventually be known from 1941 as his Systematic Theology. This textbook was used in Louisville, Columbia, and Princeton seminaries (among other institutions) from the time of its release.²⁶Evidently, it was Michigander John Kuizenga who introduced the use of Berkhof’s textbook at Princeton. Berkhof gladly acknowledged his indebtedness to Herman Bavinck (1873–1921) as well as his former Princeton mentors, B. B. Warfield and Geerhardus Vos.²⁷Details of Berkhof’s life and written works is provided in Henry Zwaanstra, “Louis Berkhof,” in Reformed Theology in America, ed. David F. Wells (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 153–71. At Princeton Seminary, in the same years as Berkhof, was Donald Grey Barnhouse (1895–1960). Leaving the seminary in 1917 without graduating, Barnhouse joined the American forces in the late stages of the Great War (1914–1918) and then remained in Europe after the armistice to engage in missionary and pastoral work. By 1927, he was called as pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, where he remained until his death in 1960. Known for his premillennialism, Barnhouse was also a forthright Calvinist who made his views known in expository sermons (regularly published in book form), in his broadcast (“The Bible Study Hour”), in a magazine (Eternity), and (after WWII) in preaching missions which took him to Cambridge University and the British Keswick Conventions. Especially in his student ministry at Cambridge, Barnhouse’s forthright Calvinistic views represented an emphasis not heard there for some time.²⁸J. A. Carpenter, “Donald Grey Barnhouse” in Dictionary of the Presbyterian and Reformed Tradition in America, 26, and B. J. Leonard, “Barnhouse, Donald Grey” in Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, ed. Timothy Larsen (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003), 34–36. Barnhouse’s controversial visits to Cambridge are described in O. R. Barclay, From Cambridge to the World: 125 Years of Student Witness (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2002), 137–38.

Overlapping with Barnhouse’s years at Princeton was Floyd E. Hamilton (1890–1969). Having obtained the Bachelor of Divinity in 1919, Hamilton returned to complete the ThM in 1926. Serving as a Presbyterian missionary educator in Korea, Hamilton eventually published well-known books in theology and apologetics in English such as The Basis of the Christian Faith (1927) and The Reformed Faith in the Modern World (1932). Future Columbia Theological Seminary (Decatur, GA) historical theologian, William Childs Robinson, completed the Princeton ThM in 1921. Future Fuller Seminary theologian, the Hungarian Bela Vassady (1902–1992), had completed the Princeton ThM under Caspar Wistar Hodge Jr. in 1925. Future Fuller Seminary colleague Everett F. Harrison (1902–1999) graduated from Princeton in 1927. The year 1932 was notable for friends of the Reformed faith because of the release by Eerdmans of Grand Rapids of the still-widely read Reformed Doctrine of Predestination by Loraine Boettner. The book reflected research for which Boettner had received the Princeton ThM in 1929. At the time of his book’s release, Boettner was on the faculty of Pikeville College, a PCUSA institution in eastern Kentucky.²⁹Boettner taught Bible and Theology at Pikeville 1929–1937. “Boettner, Loraine,” Wikipedia .

4.3. Life inside Princeton after 1929

In the academic year immediately following the reorganization of 1929, seminarians at Princeton heard an interesting series of Stone Lectures delivered by Valentine Hepp (1879–1950), the successor to Herman Bavinck at Amsterdam’s Free University. These lectures (published in the same year) were entitled “Calvinism and the Philosophy of Nature.”³⁰Published under that title in the same year by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. Princeton Seminary alumnus George Johnson of Lincoln University gave the 1931 Stone Lectures on “Evangelical Calvinism and Modern Problems.” In the 1935 Stone Lectures, seminarians at Princeton heard a series of lectures from a Pittsburgh minister and professor of Pastoral Theology in Western Seminary, Allegheny, Hugh Thompson Kerr Sr. (1871–1950). These Stone Lectures, published as A God-Centered Faith: Studies in the Reformed Faith, offered a stirring defense of the sovereignty of God in world affairs, in salvation, and in worship.³¹Hugh Thompson Kerr, A God Centered Faith (Chicago: Revell, 1935). It would appear that Kerr represented the large moderate party in the Presbyterian Church USA as described by Bradley Longfield in The Presbyterian Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). He cordially supported the Westminster Standards and showed himself well abreast of Reformation history, theology, and liturgy. In 1940, with World War being waged in Europe, Princeton Seminary students heard lectures on “John Calvin and Modern Protestantism” by British Congregationalist theologian J. S. Whale (1896–1997). The notion that at or about 1929 Princeton had raised the white flag of surrender regarding Reformed theology and evangelical Calvinism represents a serious over-simplification of a complex situation. Notable graduates from before the seminary’s 1929 reorganization continued to ably defend the Reformed position. For at least a decade beyond that lamentable reorganization, Princeton continued to train soundly conservative and Reformed candidates for the ministry. And when, beginning in 1944, Princeton Seminary first granted the Th D for advanced theological study, it was evident that the seminary was a destination of choice for many theological conservatives who went on to take their places in American colleges and seminaries.³²Moorehead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture, 424. An early doctoral graduate of Princeton was Eugene Osterhaven (1915–2004), professor of theology in Western Seminary, Holland. He graduated from Princeton in 1948. In the same year, NT commentator William Hendriksen (1900–1992) also gained the Princeton ThD. Anthony Hoekema (1913–1988), long professor of theology in Calvin Seminary, Grand Rapids, received the Princeton doctorate in 1953. Another doctoral candidate, J. Barton Payne, found the completion of the Princeton ThD (1949) trying. See Simon Kistemaker, “William Hendriksen” in Bible Interpreters of the Twentieth Century: A Selection of Evangelical Voices, ed. Walter Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999); and Philip Barton Payne, “John Barton Payne,” in Bible Interpreters of the Twentieth Century, 345–55. It needs also to be said that Princeton Seminary was by no means a solitary long-established institution teaching the Reformed faith in the inter-war years and beyond.³³It is important to draw attention also to the ongoing role of Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, which continued to train orthodox and confessional ministers well into the 1950s. Light is shed on this institution by David B. Calhoun’s Our Southern Zion: Old Columbia Seminary 1828–1927 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2012) and Pleading for a Reformation Vision: The Life and Selected Writings of William Childs Robinson, 1897–1982 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2013).

5. A Trans-Atlantic League of Broadly Calvinist Scholarship

Amsterdam’s Free University and affiliate denomination, the Gereformeerde Kerken influenced the wider Reformed world far more in the inter-war period than is currently acknowledged. Through invitations extended to its theological professors to give Stone Lectures in Princeton Seminary³⁴We have referred, above, to the 1930 Stone Lectures delivered by the Free University’s Valentine Hepp. Hepp’s predecessor, Herman Bavinck, had delivered the 1908 Stone Lectures, The Philosophy of Revelation. In 1898, Bavinck’s predecessor, Abraham Kuyper, had himself been Stone lecturer, delivering his Lectures on Calvinism. and partly through the fact that its American daughter church, the Christian Reformed Church, had come to look on Princeton as a trustworthy institution for its ministers pursuing advanced study, Holland’s Gereformeerde Kerken pursued definite initiatives in building trans-Atlantic Calvinist relations. A prime example of this was an international speaking tour undertaken by theologian Valentine Hepp in 1924. This promoted the idea of an international Calvinist federation in a time when the transnational League of Nations was struggling to assert itself.³⁵Hepp’s speaking tour brought him to the USA in 1924. It is described by George Harinck in an essay, “Valentijn Hepp in America: Attempts at International Exchange in the 1920’s,” in Sharing the Reformed Tradition: The Dutch-North American Exchange, 1846–1996, ed. George Harinck and Hans Krabbendam (Amsterdam: VU, 1996). Hepp’s argument in favor of an international Calvinist federation was eventually put into printed form in a booklet of 45 pages: Internationaal Calvinisme (Goes, Netherlands: Oosterbaan & Le Cointre, 1929). The Free University pursued a similar international interest through its invitation in 1927 to the Scottish church historian, Donald Maclean, to deliver a set of lectures later published as Aspects of Scottish Church History.³⁶D. W. Bebbington, “Calvin and British Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” in Calvin & His Influence, 1509–2009, ed. Irena Backus and Philip Benedict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 294. The theologians of the Free University and its supportive denomination, the Gereformeerde Kerken, also followed quite closely the growing tensions within Princeton Seminary from the mid-1920s onwards. Valentine Hepp, upon completing his Princeton Stone Lectures in 1930 journeyed to Philadelphia to visit with J. Gresham Machen and the faculty of the newly-founded Westminster Seminary.³⁷Harinck, “Valentijn Hepp in America,” 129–34. From the start, the perspectives of the Free University and its supporting constituency were well represented at Westminster.³⁸J. Gresham Machen’s young colleague in New Testament at the new seminary was his former Princeton student and recent Free University doctoral graduate, Ned B. Stonehouse. With such an international concern to see the Reformed faith advanced, other Dutch initiatives could be expected.

6. A New Theological Journal

It is quite well known that coinciding with the administrative re-organization of Princeton Seminary in 1929 came the demise of the Princeton Theological Review. The then-editor, Old Testament scholar Oswald T. Allis (1880–1973), had determined to follow Gresham Machen to Philadelphia.³⁹“Allis, Oswald T.” in Dictionary of the Presbyterian and Reformed Tradition in America, 17. Allis resigned from Westminster in 1935 because he would not endorse the rival mission agency which J. Gresham Machen had promoted and for support of which Machen was eventually removed from the ministry of the Presbyterian Church USA. Princeton would not have its own theological periodical again until the 1944 launch of Theology Today; the Princeton offshoot, Westminster, would not launch its own periodical, the Westminster Theological Journal, until 1939.⁴⁰It was highly significant that in the second installment of the first volume of the Westminster Theological Journal a capable article by Lawrence B. Gilmore appeared, surveying stirrings in the Reformed world of the type surveyed in this essay. See his “The Present State, Prospects and Progress of the Reformed Theology” WTJ 1.2 (1939): 65–88. The old Princeton Theological Review had gained an international reputation as a forum for serious conservative biblical and theological scholarship. Would anything fill the void created by its termination?

What is much less well known is that in the year of the old Review’s demise, there was inaugurated a new journal, The Evangelical Quarterly. It commenced where the old journal had left off. Two professors at the Free Church College, Edinburgh, Donald Maclean (1869–1943) and John R. Mackay (1865–1939), initially shared the editorship.⁴¹The crucial role played by faculty members at Edinburgh’s Free Church of Scotland College in the launch of the Evangelical Quarterly and the beginning of the 1930s international Calvinist congresses is highlighted in the present author’s “In the Vanguard of the 1930s’ Reformed Resurgence: Edinburgh’s Free Church College,” EvQ 95 (2024): 1–19. In preparing the latter article, I was materially assisted by access to the M Th thesis of Iain K. Macleod, “The Contemporary Significance and Continuing Relevance of the Ministry of Donald Maclean” (MTh diss., Edinburgh Theological Seminary, 2021). They would shortly be assisted by Oswald T. Allis, formerly of Princeton and now of Westminster Seminary, and another Old Testament Scholar, G. Ch. Aalders (1880–1961) of Amsterdam’s Free University. Examining the Evangelical Quarterly in its initial decades, one finds the senior generation of Princeton scholars continuing to advance their orthodox Calvinist views in the company of other scholars from within the USA, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Hungary, and South Africa.⁴²I am grateful to the website, biblicalstudies.org, which makes early issues of the Evangelical Quarterly available online. This was all consistent with its aim to provide “reverent exposition of the Reformed faith.” ⁴³F. F. Bruce, “Evangelical Quarterly,” in Scottish Dictionary of Church History and Theology, ed. Nigel M. Cameron (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1993), 305.

The lead issue of 1929 featured an article by Caspar Wistar Hodge Jr. on “The Reformed Faith.” Charles Erdman, Princeton’s pastoral theologian, is also found there. Soon one sees articles on World Mission and World Religions by the same seminary’s Samuel Zwemer and an extended series of articles on the Calvinist “ordo salutis” by a Southern theologian, Thomas Cary Johnson (1859–1936), by then retired from Union Theological Seminary, Virginia. There is fresh light on Bucer study by the German Calvin scholar of Halle University, August Lang (1867–1945), and contributions from the Calvin biographer Émile Doumerge (1844–1937).⁴⁴Lang had first come to the attention of the English-speaking world by his contributing an essay to the 1909 commemorative volume edited by B. B. Warfield, Calvin and the Reformation (New York: Revell, 1909). Hungarian Calvinism is represented in the writing of the Budapest theologian, Jenö Sebestyén.⁴⁵See a helpful introduction to this Hungarian theologian in Steve Bishop, “Jenö Sebestyén: the Hungarian Kuyper,” Findings 6 (2024): 30–36. French Calvinism is represented through articles by the Calvin biographer Jean Cadiér (1898–1981) and the Paris Reformed theologian Auguste Lecerf (1872–1943).⁴⁶On Lecerf, see Daniel Reid, “Auguste Lecerf: An Historical Study of the ‘First of the Modern French Calvinists’” (MTh diss., La Faculté de Théologie Réformée, 1979); and Steve Bishop, “August Lecerf: The Most Important French Neo-Calvinist of the Twentieth Century,” NeoCalviniana (2024), https://journal.neocalviniana.org/article/115324-auguste-lecerf-the-most-influential-french-neocalvinist-of-the-twentieth-century. We also begin to see contributions of the Free University of Amsterdam faculty of theology members, G. Ch. Aalders (1889–1961), H. H. Kuyper (1864–1945), Jan Ridderbos (1879–1960), Valentine Hepp (1871– 1950), and F. W. Grosheide (1881–1972).

Though a good proportion of contributors to the Quarterly were senior scholars, there are clear exceptions to this, such as the young theologian of Columbia Seminary, William Childs Robinson (1897–1982). We also find contributions from youthful faculty members of the newly founded Westminster Theological Seminary: Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) and Edward J. Young (1907–1968). On the UK side, there is the young Thomas F. Torrance (1913–2007), who was not yet on the Faculty of New College, Edinburgh, and the promising Anglican Calvin scholar T. H. L. Parker (1916–2016). We also see numerous contributions from the young Geoffrey Bromiley (1915– 2009), who would later make a name as a historical theologian at Fuller Seminary and as a translator of Barth. This broadly-Reformed orientation of the Evangelical Quarterly underwent no significant change under its initial editors, remained the same under a new editor, J. H. S. Burleigh, in 1943 (at which time the management of the journal was assumed by British Inter-Varsity Press) and took only a slightly more eclectic turn under F. F. Bruce (1910–1990) when he assumed the editorship in 1950. It is under Bruce’s editorship that we find two early contributions from J. I. Packer (1926–2020).⁴⁷J. I. Packer, “The Puritan Treatment of Justification,” EvQ 24.3 (1952): 131–143; “Keswick and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification,” EvQ 27.3 (1955): 153–67.

7. International Conferences in Europe and the U.S.A.

The Evangelical Quarterly was hardly an isolated example of this international Calvinist resurgence. In the same spirit, an even wider international evangelical Calvinism was promoted from 1932 onward by a series of “International Calvinist Congresses” which drew delegates from South Africa, the United Kingdom, the USA, France, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The drive leading to the organization of such conferences had a humble origin in the 1920s in the annual conferences of the relatively unknown Sovereign Grace Union within the United Kingdom. A visiting Dutch minister of the Gereformeerde Kerken, Dr. J. N. Van Lonkhuysen (1873–1942), presented an academic paper at their 1928 conference and subsequently helped connect this organization with interested parties in his denomination and in Amsterdam’s Free University.⁴⁸Steve Bishop has illumined Van Lonkhuysen’s varied career on both sides of the Atlantic in an article, “Jan van Lonkhuysen: International Ambassador for Neo Calvinism,” CTJ 59 (2024): 295–322. The leadership of the Sovereign Grace Union was invited to Amsterdam and witnessed in the Netherlands a more vigorous Calvinist movement than existed in the United Kingdom. From this root the concept of a truly international series of conferences sprang up.⁴⁹The seminal influence of Henry Atherton of the S.G.U. and the stimulation provided by his introduction to the vigorous Calvinism of the Gereformeerde Kerken in the late 1920’s is narrated in D. W. Bebbington, “Lloyd Jones and the Interwar Calvinist Resurgence,” in Engaging with Martyn Lloyd Jones, ed. Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2011), 47, 48; D. W. Bebbington, “Calvin and British Evangelicalism in Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Calvin and His Influence, 1509–2009, ed. Irena Backus and Philip Benedict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Steve Bishop, “A History of the Reformational Movement in Britain: the Pre-WWII Years,” Koers: Bulletin for Christian Scholarship 80.4 (2015): 3–4. In the pre-war years, these semi-annual “International Calvinistic Congresses” were held in London (1932), Amsterdam (1934), Geneva (1936), and Edinburgh (1938). These were not ecclesiastical assemblies, encompassing delegates sent by denominations, but voluntary gatherings of persons who were eager to see the Reformed agenda kept alive. In these gatherings we meet many of the individuals who have already been publishing essays since 1929 in the Evangelical Quarterly as well as others.⁵⁰The Evangelical Quarterly itself provided a report on the 1938 Edinburgh Conference: S. L. Hunt, “The Fourth International Calvinistic Congress,” EvQ 10.4 (1938): 390–96. The sequence of four pre-war bi-annual conferences is referred to in an interesting entry on the League of Nations website: http://www.lonsea.de/pub/org/934. The author has examined the published proceedings of the 1932 (London), the 1934 (Amsterdam), 1936 (Geneva) and 1938 (Edinburgh) conferences. This pre-war movement re-grouped in Amsterdam in1948 and subsequently held re-branded conferences as the International Association for Reformed Faith and Action beginning at Montpellier (1953). One fascinating aspect of this movement is the way in which these conferences drew together supporters of the Reformed faith from theologically inclusive denominations, as well as their conservative counterparts.

In the USA, news of these European conferences helped to spur the creation of events which more or less mirrored those already underway in Europe. By 1939 at Paterson, New Jersey, there began a series of interdenominational theological conferences, led by Christian Reformed minister, Jacob T. Hoogstra (1900–1979), and drawing on presenters representing the Reformed Church in America, Hungarian Reformed Church, Christian Reformed Church, and various American Presbyterian bodies. There were also European visitors on hand as presenters. Names with which we are already familiar from the first decade of the Evangelical Quarterly are there as participants: Dr. John Macleod (1872–1948) of Edinburgh was there alongside Prof. G. Ch. Aalders of Amsterdam. The young John Murray (1898–1975), now at Philadelphia, was on hand to give a major paper. A gathering of 500 at the initial Paterson event helped to ensure that there would be follow-up events.⁵¹Details of the conference program, presenters, and major papers were circulated in a post-conference hardbound volume, Jacob T. Hoogstra, ed., The Sovereignty of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1939). Published remains of subsequent conferences held in 1942 (in which Harold J. Ockenga was a keynote speaker), 1946, 1952, 1956, and 1959, all edited by John T. Hoogstra, illustrate that this was a vigorous movement drawing together a steadily widening circle of Reformed sympathizers.⁵²The author also has in his possession the published proceedings from 1956 (Jacob T. Hoogstra, ed. American Calvinism: A Survey [ Grand Rapids: Baker, 1957]) and 1959 (Jacob T. Hoogstra, ed., John Calvin: Contemporary Prophet [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1959]). The standard of the conference presentations continued to be high during this entire two-decade period as the conferences drew on both American and European scholars.

The literary activity demonstrated in the Evangelical Quarterly and the conference activity just described in Europe soon encouraged the publication of a new periodical in the U SA. This was the Calvin Forum, which was launched from Grand Rapids in 1935. Under the editorial leadership of Calvin Seminary professor Clarence Bouma (1891–1962), there appeared a new periodical which ran from 1935–1955. A monthly magazine, the Forum drew on a range of writers from Reformed Church of America, Hungarian and French Reformed Churches within the USA, the Christian Reformed Church, various American Presbyterian bodies, as well as foreign churches to comment on contemporary theology, world events, and ecclesiastical affairs. Bouma, like his seminary colleague, Louis Berkhof, was a Princeton Seminary alumnus who had wide horizons. Bouma maintained ongoing contact with the editors of the Evangelical Quarterly.⁵³Invited to speak to a July 1939 international student conference at Cambridge University (out of which movement would grow the post-war International Fellowship of Evangelical Students), Bouma lingered in the UK long enough to visit Donald Maclean in Scotland. His contribution to the Cambridge conference was published (with others) in Christ Our Freedom (London: Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1939). Bouma’s account of the conference is provided in Calvin Forum 5.1–2 (1939): 7–9. He paid tribute to Maclean at his passing in 1943, recalling their meeting in the summer of 1939. Calvin Forum 8.8 (1943): 155, 156. The Calvin Forum was aimed at a slightly more popular audience than the Evangelical Quarterly; it had a readership abroad as well as at home. In 1936, Dr. D. M. Lloyd-Jones, still ministering in Wales, wrote to say how much he valued it.⁵⁴See D. M. Lloyd Jones, “A Voice from Wales,” Calvin Forum 2.4 (1936): 92. Readers from as far afield as Australia, South Africa, and Scotland said the same. The Forum represented a commendable aspiration within the sponsoring Christian Reformed community that American Calvinists could link arms to advance the Reformed cause within North America while maintaining ties with the European movements already named.

8. What the Observers Saw

With all this transatlantic activity, there were not lacking observers who were ready to comment on this resurgence. As early as 1936, the quite liberal American historical theologian A. C. McGiffert Jr. (1893–1993) posed the question, “Is Calvin Coming Back?” While he was aware that new interest in the Reformer of Geneva was being generated by the writings of Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, he did not see much of a following for the Swiss theologians in 1936 America. What he did see, however, was how formerly liberal American theologians were returning to traditional conceptions of original sin and its spread throughout a culture. It is clear that McGiffert has in mind contemporary American theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) and Douglas Horton (1891–1968), writers he describes as “religious realists.”⁵⁵A. C. McGiffert Jr., “Is Calvin Coming Back?” Christendom 1 (1936): 310–22, note especially p. 319. From Budapest, a similar judgment was expressed in the same year by the Hungarian John Victor in an Evangelical Quarterly article, “The Revival of Calvinism.” Victor believed he was witnessing a resurgence of both Calvinism and Lutheranism, “part of a larger phenomenon, i.e., a return to the teaching of the Reformation.” This was a theological course correction in light of the hard lessons learned in the Great War.⁵⁶John Victor, “The Revival of Calvinism,” EvQ 8.1 (1936): 36–46, note especially p. 39. The Baptist minister Ernest F. Kevan, just made principal of the London Bible College (f.1943), published an article in the Evangelical Quarterly, “The Re-Emergence of Calvinism,” in mid-war. Kevan was able to provide five lines of explanation for the current phenomenon. One in particular stood out: in the then decade-old struggle against totalitarian regimes, the Reformed emphasis on the transcendence and sovereignty of God was never more needed.⁵⁷E. F. Kevan, “The Re-Emergence of Calvinism,” EvQ 15.3 (1943): 216–23.

9. A Surge of Publications about Calvin and Calvinism in the 1930–1950 Period

With all this trans-Atlantic activity in theological periodicals and international conferences, it was only natural to find that—in spite of the austerities of economic depression, world war, and its aftermath—there was a surge in the publication of books and monographs. The period was inaugurated by the 1931 release of a substantial volume by Georgia Harkness, John Calvin: The Man and His Ethics.⁵⁸Georgia Harkness (New York: Holt, 1931). It needs to be acknowledged that Harkness was not herself keen on Calvin. A sympathetic biography of Calvin was issued by the English writer, R. N. Carew Hunt, in 1933.⁵⁹R. N. Carew Hunt, Calvin (London: Centenary, 1933). The publishing house of the PCUSA, the Westminster Press, issued a fresh printing of Calvin’s Institutes in 1936, complete with an introduction by the late B. B. Warfield (d.1921). From pre-war Germany came Wilhelm Niesel’s The Theology of Calvin (1938).⁶⁰Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of Calvin, trans. Harold Knight (London: Lutterworth, 1956). The 1938 Die Theologie Calvins was only translated into English following the war. In 1939, Hugh Thomson Kerr Sr. (whom we have already met as a Princeton Stone lecturer) released a volume which is still in print 80 years later, A Compend of the Institutes of John Calvin.⁶¹Hugh Thomson Kerr Sr., A Compend of the Institutes of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1939). Kerr’s son, Hugh T. Kerr, followed with a Compend of Luther’s Theology in 1943.

The principal of Bristol Baptist College, Arthur Dakin, released a very supportive work simply entitled Calvinism in 1940. In a chapter, significantly entitled “Revived Interest in Calvinism,” Dakin explained that quite apart from interest recently stirred regarding Calvin and his fellow Reformers by the Swiss theologian, Barth, there were solid reasons for reading Calvin and taking him seriously. He commended Calvin as the remedy for an “anthropocentrism” which had characterized too much theology in the previous hundred years.⁶²Arthur Dakin, Calvinism (London: Duckworth, 1940). See ch. 15. By 1947, the young Anglican church historian, T. H. L. Parker (1916–2016), who had trained at Cambridge under Congregationalist theologian, John S. Whale, released the first of his many works on Calvin: The Oracles of God: A Study in the Preaching of Calvin.⁶³London: Lutterworth, 1947. Parker had been publishing his Calvin research in the Evangelical Quarterly since 1940.⁶⁴So, for instance, T. H. L. Parker, “A Bibliography and Survey of the British Study of Calvin: 1900– 1940,” EvQ 18.2 (1946): 123–31. We remember Parker today as the author of two Calvin biographies as well as studies on the Reformer’s biblical commentaries.⁶⁵Parker’s two biographies of Calvin were A Portrait of Calvin (London, SCM,1960) and John Calvin: A Life (Philadelphia: Westminster,1974). An appreciation of Parker’s career is published on the website of the evangelical Anglican journal, Churchman, https://www.churchsociety.org/resource/thl-parker-on-calvin-the-reformation-and-justification/ He would rapidly follow up the release of Oracles of God with a second important work, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God: A Study in Calvin’s Theology.⁶⁶T. H. L. Parker, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God: A Study in Calvin’s Theology (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1952). By 1949, the American scholar Paul T. Fuhrmann had translated Calvin’s 1537 Instruction in Faith, Calvin’s simplified version of his first Institutes.⁶⁷John Calvin, Instruction in Faith (1537), trans. Paul T. Fuhrmann (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949). That same year, the Grand Rapids publisher, Eerdmans, commenced the republication of the complete series of commentaries, tracts, and Institutes of Calvin first published in fresh translation in the early Victorian period.⁶⁸All were the products of the Calvin Translation Society, established at Edinburgh in 1843.

Another guide to Calvin, produced by Adam Hunter, the librarian of New College, Edinburgh, was the sympathetic 1950 volume, The Teaching of Calvin. It was an attempt to make the teaching of the Reformer available in an accessible form in the post-war period. Like T. H. L. Parker, Hunter had been supplying segments of this eventual book to the Evangelical Quarterly for a decade beforehand.⁶⁹Adam Hunter, The Teaching of Calvin (London: Clarke, 1950). Specialized volumes devoted to single aspects of Calvin’s teaching were rapidly appearing in these post-war years. Having alluded to Parker’s volumes we can now consider the published doctoral research of the young T. F. Torrance (1913–2007), Calvin’s Doctrine of Man.⁷⁰Thomas F. Torrance, Calvin’s Doctrine of Man (London: Lutterworth, 1952). There would soon follow other published dissertations such as that of Ronald Wallace’s Calvin’s Doctrine of the Word and Sacraments,⁷¹Ronald Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953). John F. Jansen’s Calvin’s Doctrine of the Work of Christ (1956), and Paul Van Buren, Christ in Our Place: The Substitutionary Character of Calvin’s Doctrine of Reconciliation (1957).⁷²John F. Jansen, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Work of Christ (London: Lutterworth, 1956); Paul Van Buren, Christ in Our Place: The Substitutionary Character of Calvin’s Doctrine of Reconciliation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957). These titles, by American authors, are included in this largely U K grouping because they reflect research done in this period.

French Calvinists were not idle in this period, from 1930 to the 1950s. An active contributor to the Evangelical Quarterly was the Paris Reformed theologian, Auguste Lecerf (1872–1943). He left behind his Introduction to Reformed Dogmatics (1949).⁷³Auguste Lecerf, An Introduction to Reformed Dogmatics, trans. S. L.-H. (London: Lutterworth, 1949). Many of us have read with appreciation the compact biography of Calvin by Jean Cadiér (1898–1981), The Man God Mastered (1960).⁷⁴Jean Cadiér, The Man God Mastered: A Brief Biography of John Calvin, trans. O. R. Johnston (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1960). This work was the first work on Calvin and Calvinism acquired by this writer. Cadièr had also edited a fresh three-volume edition of the Institutes (1955–1958). A pupil of Auguste Lecerf, Pierre Charles Marcel (1910–1992) became increasingly well known to readers of English through his books on preaching and on the doctrine of baptism.⁷⁵Pierre Charles Marcel, The Biblical Doctrine of Infant Baptism, trans. Philip Edgcumbe Hughes (London: Lutterworth, 1959); The Relevance of Preaching, trans. Rob Roy McGregor (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1963). In the university of Strasbourg, François Wendel (1905–1972) produced a dissertation which was published as Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Thought; this was widely used as a textbook in French, English, and German.⁷⁶François Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950; repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1963); “François Wendel (1905–1972),” Musée protestante, https://www.museeprotestant.org/en/notice/francois-wendel-1905-1972-2/.

If it should occur to us that the bulk of these examples have come from the United Kingdom and France, it is easy to point out that American writers were also industrious in this post-war period. In this same era, a Reformed Church in America minister, Leroy Nixon, edited three sets of Calvin sermons for publication.⁷⁷John Calvin, The Deity of Christ, ed. and trans. Leroy Nixon (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950); The Mystery of Godliness, ed. and trans. Leroy Nixon (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950), Sermons from Job, ed. and trans. Leroy Nixon (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952). I am indebted to I. John Hesselink’s essay, “Calvin Studies in North America,” in Restoration Through Redemption: John Calvin Revisited, ed. Henk van den Belt (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 223–24, for this data. Having completed his doctoral studies at Zurich, Edward A. Dowey (1918–2003) published his The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology.⁷⁸Edward A. Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). The book is now in its third edition. Shortly, the Calvinist constituency took special note of the release of John T. McNeill’s The History and Character of Calvinism (1954), which provided a digest of Calvin research as of that time.⁷⁹John T. McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954). The book is still in print as this paper is written. To say that this book has stood the test of time is something of an understatement; 70 years after its release, it is still in print from its original publisher. The Christian Reformed Church theologian, Jacob T. Hoogstra, assembled an impressive series of international and interdenominational essays for the 1959 Calvin celebrations, John Calvin: Contemporary Prophet.⁸⁰Jacob T. Hoogstra, John Calvin: Contemporary Prophet (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1959). This volume reproduced the conference papers given at a meeting of the American Calvinistic Congress, described above. The Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia theologian John Murray (1898–1975) demonstrated his participation in this surge of scholarship with his 1960 study, Calvin on Scripture and Divine Sovereignty.⁸¹John Murray, Calvin on Scripture and Divine Sovereignty (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1960). By 1964, Murray would release Calvin as Theologian and Expositor (London: Evangelical Library, 1964), a print version of the 1964 Evangelical Library lecture.

Having reached the 1950s—in which we have seen that some contemporary conservative Calvinist observers were certain that the outlook was uniformly bleak (at least outside strictly conservative settings)—we must still reckon with one of the Christian publishing phenomena of that decade: the eventual release (commencing in 1954) in twenty-six volumes of the Library of Christian Classics. The classics were hard cover volumes, released simultaneously in London and Philadelphia, comprised of treatises (in whole or in part) from the whole sweep of the history of the church from the second through the sixteenth centuries. For our purposes here, we can simply note that of twenty-six volumes in total, four volumes were given over to the writings of Calvin. The two-volume edition of the 1559 Institutes was a scholarly edition complete with copious footnotes and indices.⁸²John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960). It had to compete at its release with two nineteenth century editions, both of which were still in print, but it gradually established itself as the premier edition. A third volume, given the title Calvin: Theological Treatises,⁸³John Calvin, Calvin: Theological Treatises, ed. and trans. J. K. S. Reid (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954). provided the reader with a sampling of the writings which had earlier appeared in a three-volume Victorian edition which bore the name Tracts and Treatises. A fourth volume, edited by Joseph Haroutunian and entitled Calvin Commentaries (1958) provided excerpts from his renowned exegetical works.⁸⁴John Calvin, Calvin Commentaries, ed. and trans. Joseph Haroutunian (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1958). The release of Calvin’s Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, also edited and translated by J. K. S. Reid (London: Lutterworth, 1961), seems to represent an extension of the editorial work Reid had done for the 1954 L. C. C. volume. Interestingly, Reid was another who had contributed to the Evangelical Quarterly in the 1940’s. See for example his “The Church and the Modern State,” EvQ 15.2 (1943): 91–118.

10. Implications of the Above

First, a caveat. The inclusion of an author or a title in this survey of twentieth century periodicals and writers carries with it no unqualified endorsement. Every reader of this essay will be able to identify one or more authors or titles about which serious questions might be asked. But with this acknowledged, please consider:

A. That the claim made for the “new Calvinism” that it is indebted to neither Grand Rapids nor Westminster, muddies a complicated question. There is in fact a largely-unacknowledged debt owed by the new Calvinism to earlier Reformed scholarship that has only been hinted at by passing references to the late R. C. Sproul (the one-time protégé of John Gerstner) and to Wayne Grudem, author of a widely-popular Systematic Theology (1994).⁸⁵Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994). The current edition of Grudem’s Systematic Theology claims that 500,000 copies of this work are in print. Grudem, for his part, has never disguised the fact that he is an alumnus of Westminster Seminary. ⁸⁶See https://www.waynegrudem.com/about. John Piper, in acknowledging his role as a senior figure in “new Calvinism,” has spoken of the ways in which he is indebted to the same institution.⁸⁷John Piper, “The New Calvinism and the New Community,” Desiring God, 12 March 2014, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/the-new-calvinism-and-the-new-community. Our purpose is not to plead for the indispensability of that particular seminary (in fact it has played a lesser role in this paper than one might have anticipated) but simply to make the more general point that today’s “new Calvinists” do regularly draw on the literature produced by Calvinistic scholars from the last hundred years but without necessarily grasping adequately what it represents. It was encouraging to see John Piper assisting in the republication of Parker’s small Portrait of Calvin (1954) in conjunction with the 2009 Calvin celebrations.⁸⁸T. H. L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin, reprint ed. (Minneapolis: Desiring God, 2009).

Even if one were to argue that this mid-twentieth century literature did not produce our modern movement, it cannot be denied that it resources it today. Acknowledging the usefulness of this legacy is not simply a matter of historical honesty; it is a matter of theological accountability. Acknowledgement of this debt can help “new Calvinists” to grasp the principle that there is, after all, a transmission history at work in Reformed theology. On the other hand, acknowledgement of this debt can help those loyal to an older Calvinism to recall that pure ecclesiology has not necessarily been the “sine qua non” determining what is and what is not useful scholarship.

B. The more conventional claim that the modern Calvinist resurgence is traceable to Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and his circle, and the efforts of the Banner of Truth movement contains important elements of truth but also elements of distortion.⁸⁹Banner of Truth literature is just as popular among “new Calvinists” as among others. The Princeton theological tradition that Lloyd-Jones discovered in 1932 by reading Warfield was not yet “on the ropes.” There was, in fact, already in progress what David Bebbington has called “an international Calvinist revival.”⁹⁰Bebbington, “Calvin and British Evangelicalism,” 293. Lloyd-Jones joined a movement already in progress. The editor of the Evangelical Quarterly¸ Donald Maclean, was in fact a kind of theological mentor to Lloyd-Jones (who, remember, had trained in medicine).⁹¹Bebbington, “Calvin and British Evangelicalism,” 297. Lloyd-Jones was himself part of a much larger transatlantic network of persons, some older, some younger than himself. Lloyd-Jones demonstrated this relationship both by writing for the Evangelical Quarterly (whose editorial board he joined), attending post-war Calvinist Congresses organized by others, and following assiduously the American Calvin Forum from the launch of that publication in 1935.⁹²Lloyd-Jones’s involvement in the post-war congresses is described by Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith, 155, 281. See his involvement in Evangelical Quarterly as early as 14.1 (1942). We have noted his appreciation for the Calvin Forum above at footnote 54 . There is no denying that Lloyd-Jones was a primary mover in the revival of interest in Puritanism but he should at the same time be seen as a participant in an international Reformed resurgence already in progress.⁹³Lloyd-Jones initially tried to see Puritan studies incorporated into the priorities of Tyndale House, Cambridge, but, failing in this attempt, worked with the assistance of the young J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnson to launch the annual Puritan Conference at Westminster Chapel. See Alister McGrath, J. I. Packer: A Biography (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1997), 50–51. That his interests extended beyond Puritanism is made clear by his reviewing of two volumes of the Studies in Dogmatics series by Free University of Amsterdam theologian, G. C. Berkouwer in EvQ 25.2 (1953): 107–10.

Moreover, the movement which we see reflected in the Evangelical Quarterly cannot be simply equated with conservative evangelicalism, though no doubt this was the position of the periodical’s initial editors and the majority of its early contributors. This inter-war movement was an alliance embracing evangelical Protestants of several stripes, including some early Protestant followers of the Swiss dialectical theology.⁹⁴After its founding in 1948, the Scottish Journal of Theology would serve some of the constituency which for the previous two decades had looked to the Evangelical Quarterly. We need to consider what happened to this earlier alliance and ask whether we have not—in the decades since—been willing to draw the Calvinist circle too tightly, and this to the hurt of our own evangelical movements.⁹⁵It is highly interesting that journalist Collin Hansen, whose article (later a book),“Young, Restless, and Reformed,” named at the outset of this essay, also contributed an intriguing article “Calvin for the Mainline,” (CT July 2009), www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/julyweb-only/127–52.0.html. This took note of attention paid to the anniversary of Calvin’s birth in the annual conference of the United Church of Christ.

Some evangelicals who participated in that early wider alliance became the heralds of the accelerating Calvinistic resurgence as the post-war era gave way to the cold war. In February 1959, Philip E. Hughes (1915–1990), the then-editor of Churchman, the UK Evangelical Anglican journal, described the state of Calvin and Calvinism in that country even as the American John Gerstner (in the same issue) addressed the question of Calvin’s prospects in America.⁹⁶We have alluded to Gerstner’s 1959 CT article above in this essay. Gerstner’s answer had been, “They are not good. In fact, they are very, very bad.” Hughes’s answer to the question seemed to come from an entirely different universe than had Gerstner’s:

Taking “Calvinism” in its broader and less precise sense of Reformed theology in general, however, there is much more that can be added to the picture, for, despite the prevailing climate of theological liberalism and, in certain quarters, of Anglo-medievalism, a pronounced revival of interest in the men and writings of the Reformation is discernible.⁹⁷Philip E. Hughes, “Calvinism in Great Britain Today,” CT (February 1959), www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1959/february-16/calvinism-in-great-britain-today.html.

Hughes, but not Gerstner, had been an early participant in the international post-1929 resurgence of international Calvinism. He had been a contributor to Evangelical Quarterly since 1940, had been on the teaching staff of Bristol’s Tyndale Hall, been on friendly terms with Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and had been a translator of French Reformed theological literature.⁹⁸See Hughes’s contributions to Evangelical Quarterly as early as 12.3 (1940); 14.3 (1942); 14.4 (1942) etc. Hughes was the translator of Pierre Charles Marcel’s Baptism: Sacrament of the Covenant of Grace (London: Lutterworth, 1959). Hughes had acquired an international and trans-denominational perspective on the question.

C. Though they have been reluctant to admit it, these two modern strains of Calvinism (“new Calvinism” and the post-WWII Lloyd-Jones movement) are in fact intertwined in at least two senses. First, they are intertwined by the literature that they promote. It is the Banner of Truth movement which has made (for instance) the Works of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) widely available and affordable for both movements. Both movements are also keen on the writings of the English Puritans; the publisher supplies this material to both constituencies.

They are intertwined, second, by select individuals supple enough to be counted supporters of two or more strands of the movements described in this paper. The supreme example of this intersection of interest is provided in the career of J. I. Packer (1926–2020), who first “crosses the stage” (so to speak) in this paper as a contributor to the Evangelical Quarterly, in which he displayed views informed by the writing of B. B. Warfield. He was in the same years active in coordinating the annual Puritan Conferences associated with the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Packer was also welcomed as a presenter in the 1970s Philadelphia Conferences on Reformed Theology, guest-lectured in both the Westminster Seminaries as well as Reformed Theological Seminary, ⁹⁹Established 1929 in Philadelphia and in 1979 in Escondido, respectively. and was also welcomed in the Desiring God conferences associated with the ministry of John Piper.¹⁰⁰John Piper’s recorded gratitude for Packer is given here: “Thank You Letter to J. I. Packer, Celebrating 80 Years,” Desiring God, 29 September 2006, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/thank-you-letter-to-j-i-packer-celebrating-80-years. Packer’s ability to contribute in so many settings is a tribute both to the catholicity of his evangelicalism and to the fundamental underlying unity of all these movement which have proceeded since the year 1929.

D. Finally, it should be clear by now that the two named streams of modern Calvinism which provided the starting point for this essay were never as solitary and never had the field to themselves in the way that many have imagined. The resurgence of Calvinism, which is still ongoing, is at least as old as the 1920’s, has not been confined to the world of conservative evangelicalism, and has been multi-cultural and multilingual from the start. What is more, such discussion as has gone on about the origins of our current resurgence has especially slighted the contributions made by the Dutch Reformed branch of the Reformed family, in Europe, in North America, and beyond.¹⁰¹This historical reality of significant Dutch involvement in the recovery of Reformed scholarship in the period to 1960 cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that there has been widespread theological decline in that constituency in more recent times. We have seen that Valentine Hepp was advocating for an international Calvinist alliance before anyone else was speaking about this. This heritage has been the soil from which so much fruitful thinking and writing has arisen on Scripture and on theology. When one surveys (for instance) the range of authors in the New International Commentary on the New Testament (commenced 1953) edited by Ned B. Stonehouse, such authors are visible in numbers.¹⁰²In addition to the well-known volumes of Leon Morris (John), F. F. Bruce (Acts and Hebrews), William Lane (Mark), and Philip E. Hughes (2 Corinthians), there were notable contributions from South Africans— Geldenhuys (Luke) and Muller (Philippians)— and Netherlanders— Grosheide (1 Corinthians) and Ridderbos (Galatians). The volume on the Pastoral Epistles was supplied by Grand Rapids, MI, scholar Bastian van Elderen. Alongside this project can be added the New Testament Commentary series of William Hendriksen, completed by Simon Kistemaker. Consult the New Bible Commentary (1953)¹⁰³F. Davidson, ed., The New Bible Commentary (London: Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1953). and New Bible Dictionary (1962),¹⁰⁴J. D. Douglas, ed., The New Bible Dictionary (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1962). and again these contributors are there in plain view. This has also been the branch of the Reformed family which has taken most seriously the challenge of re-stating the Christian faith, as confessed at the Reformation, in the face of the secularization so characteristic of the twentieth century. Abraham Kuyper (d.1920) and Herman Bavinck (d. 1921) stand as the clearest examples of this readiness.¹⁰⁵Note especially the four-volume Reformed Dogmatics of Herman Bavinck (1895–1901) presently available in English translation in four volumes: Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003–2008). And across the twentieth century, this neo-Calvinism has provided a stimulus for the entire evangelical movement in thinking through questions about Christianity and art, Christianity and education, Christianity and politics.¹⁰⁶See, for example, Jessica R. Joustra and Robert J. Joustra, eds, Calvinism for a Secular Age: A Twenty-First Century Reading of Abraham Kuyper’s Stone Lectures (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2022).

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