John Calvin’s works are a true gift to the church. If you have never read anything he’s written, I encourage you to try using one of his commentaries in your private studies. They often read like a devotional and can be wonderfully helpful for the Christian.

When it comes to Christianity, few theological subjects are more controversial and polarizing than Calvinism. Since the time of the Reformation, Christians, historians, and theologians all over the world have fiercely debated these doctrines. Subsequently, this has created all kinds of claims about what Calvinism teaches (some accurate and some not). Having been a Calvinist for almost 20 years, I have experienced this firsthand; I have heard it all. From robot analogies to man-worship, to even gross misunderstandings about God’s love and justice. In turn, I thought it would be useful to directly address some of the common misconceptions about the Doctrines of Grace.
This article is intended to be the first in a series on the topic of Calvinism as a whole. As stated, I will begin by addressing many of the misconceptions, then in future articles. I will build scriptural cases for several of the core doctrines represented within Calvinism.
Misconception #1: Calvinism is the Worship of John Calvin
To some (me) this might seem silly, however, I have heard the misconstruction dozens of times. I gather it is rooted in the thinking that because Calvinism is named after a specific man (John Calvin), then this implies some innate level of worship or veneration for the person. At face value, I suppose I can understand this. After all, the term “Christian” is used to describe people who worship Christ.
To put it bluntly, Calvinism does not teach the worship, adoration, or veneration of John Calvin. Rather, I would strongly argue that it teaches the exact opposite! The term “Calvinism” exists because the doctrines contained within gained popularity under the writings of Calvin. However, Calvin did not create them. His teaching large mirrors concepts taught by Saint Augustine, and the Apostle Paul before him. If anything, Calvin rediscovered scriptural truths once suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church.
Contrary to this common misconception, at the heart of Calvinism, is a principle wholly focused on the glory, holiness, and worship of God alone. Reformed Theology teaches that man is completely devoid of being worthy of any type of worship. Additionally, John Calvin never sought any worship or any type of adoration; his focus was fully on directing all praise and honor to God. If you have met a person who seems to carry some undue adoration for Calvin, this is that person’s error and has nothing to do with the person or the theology of John Calvin – he taught the opposite.
As a type of exclamation point to this misconception, I will offer a small anecdote. When Calvin was dying, he requested that his grave be unmarked. He did so because he did not want people making pilgrimages to his burial site to pay him homage. Calvin never sought the attention he has received. His concern was only to honor God through the faithful teaching of Holy Scripture.
Misconception #2: People are Robots/God’s Sovereignty Undermines Man’s Responsibility
I have heard many times this notion that if God is completely sovereign then people are like programmed robots. Implied in this accusation is that because God is sovereign man is not responsible for his actions. This is simply not true. Any casual reading of God’s Word demonstrates that man is an independent moral agent completely responsible for their actions; Calvinism would agree. However, moral responsibility does not always automatically equate to ability.
In John 6:44, our Lord Jesus Christ said, “no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him”. He is effectively saying that no one, outside of the working/drawing of God, has the ability to come to Christ. Christ also taught condemnation for those outside of Him. Both are true. Paul makes this point extensively in Romans 1-5. All men are dead in sin because all men are naturally in Adam. At the same time, God is completely sovereign in salvation. Both realities are true.
Undoubtedly, there is an element of deep mystery in this. That’s OK. God never promised that we would know everything in this life. Rather, such mysteries allow us an opportunity to die to ourselves and trust God’s Word/truth to be correct even if we can’t fully grasp it. Likely, this relationship (God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility) is some of what Paul had in mind when he exclaims in Romans 11, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (11:33).
Humans are not robots controlled by God. Instead, we are moral agents made in the image of God. We live, move, and act according to our natural ability (more on this when I come to Total Depravity).  Yet, in all of this, God remains sovereign and just; He uses our brokenness and sin to accomplish His purposes. Perhaps one of the best examples of this in scripture comes to us in the last chapter of Genesis. Joseph, when confronting his brothers on their sin against him, famously says, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (50:20).
Misconception #3: Calvinists Don’t Believe in Evangelism
This claim is rooted in some faulty logic that suggests since God elects those whom He wants to save, there is no need for Christians to evangelize. What’s the point? God will do it and save anyway. This thinking is not merely wrong, it is heretical (Hyper Calvinism). Scripture is clear: Christians are called to evangelize and share the truth of God’s love with the world; it is a fundamental role of the church.
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The authors of Overture 15, Westminster Presbytery, argue that ministers of the gospel are to be above reproach in their Christian character and self-conception and that a man would disqualify himself from ordained office in the PCA if he identified himself in terms associated with the LGBTQ+ movement or has a Gay self-conception.

I have been asked to write on why the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) presbyteries should formally vote to include the new paragraph, Overture 15 in the Book of Church Order 7-4:
Men who describe themselves as homosexual, even those who describe themselves as homosexual and claim to practice celibacy by refraining from homosexual conduct, are disqualified from holding office in the Presbyterian Church in America.
With my wife Rebecca, we were one of the first three missionary families sent out by the first General Assembly (GA) of the PCA in Birmingham, AL, in 1973. Thus, I was greatly moved by the GA speech of Palmer Robertson, a fellow missionary professor and a long-term friend, of around my age, who has been noting the growing and unique emphasis on homosexuality that he has seen in so many cultural expressions like television and public life. Like him, my conviction is that the issue will become the cause of serious Christian persecution. Clearly, we have to get this right—for ourselves and for the next Christian generation we are raising.
I will argue that presbyteries must vote in Overture 15 for two reasons: 1. For the integrity and purity of the ordained ministry; 2. for the clarity of the Gospel message we bring to the world and especially to the youth in our churches.

For the integrity and purity of the ordained ministry

We charge new candidates for ministry to “adorn the profession of the Gospel in your life, and to set a worthy example before the church” (BCO 24-5-4).
One cannot help but compare this to the words of TE Greg Johnson: 
…you wanna know about my sexual brokenness? I am happy to talk to you about what I talked about in the pulpit two weeks ago, and that I think is relevant to this conversation. I am a pornography addict. I have had a pornography addiction for 15 years. that pull is still as strong as it was. I’ve mortified this for 15 years and it still, you know, I see a computer terminal unmonitored and immediately my mind thinks, I want to look at porn. Fifteen years of strangling this thing, and it doesn’t die, it doesn’t go away…  
I know that if I look at one image, I’m going to look at a thousand. I know I’m not going to come up for air for hours.
The authors of Overture 15, Westminster Presbytery, argue that ministers of the gospel are to be above reproach in their Christian character and self-conception and that a man would disqualify himself from ordained office in the PCA if he identified himself in terms associated with the LGBTQ+ movement or has a Gay self-conception. Johnson’s “gay self-conception” is indicated by the small but significant detail that the spine of his book, Still Time To Care features the gay rainbow.
Some admire Johnson’s honesty and oppose Overture 15 because it is unfair that homosexuals alone be targeted since there are many other sinful conditions that need to be addressed that tempt ordained ministers. This year I was asked to evaluate a Ph.D. thesis by Jeffery Adams Moore whose very well argued and exegetically supported thesis is that there are three sins that Scripture specifically highlights as the most significant: the three are: “abortion, [and] assisted suicide [forms of murder]…and homosexuality.[1]  These sins “oppose the one-man, one-woman multiplication of humanity for earthly rule under the triune God’s heavenly rule. Such sins are inversions of the created order and resist the spreading of God’s image for his glory.”[2] Though a Baptist, soon-to-be Dr. Moore identifies among others John Calvin, Francis Turretin, Charles Hodge, Herman Bavinck, and Louis Berkhof as theologians adopting this conclusion. The gravity of this sin must also be understood in terms of its role in our present godless culture.

For the clarity of the Gospel message that we bring to the world and especially to the youth in our churches.

A second major issue regarding homosexuality, sometimes called “sexual androgyny” [the mixing of male and female] since it includes transgenderism, transvestitism, bi-sexuality, agenderism, drag, and cross-dressing, is not only whether it is, as such an immoral way of behaving but in what way does it deeply and fully express the worldview of paganism and thus has an important ideological status. In other words, without practicing androgynous sexuality, can one affirm it as valid, and thus be just as pagan as the small percentage of actual practitioners.
The paganization of Western culture began with the invasion of Eastern spirituality in the Sixties when people discovered personal, New Age “spirituality.” But for progressives that individual experience had to become a Western worldview, and some of the leaders knew what to do. The Jungian/Gnostic, June Singer, in 1977 made a programmatic statement that others are now putting into practice. Have you ever wondered why recently the LGBTQ agenda is now everywhere, being promoted as the great issue of contemporary social and moral rights, as professor Palmer Robertson pointed out at the GA? Why must children be taught to think this way in schools? Why is Disney committed to promoting it, at the expense of losing many parental customers? Why Drag Queens must be reading in happy hour to children in public libraries? Why has transexual Adm Rachel Levine, an overweight middle-age man and father of a number of children, appointed the 17th Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and Sam Brinton, appointed as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy, shows up to work in the White House and in Paris in heels and a short dress and make-up and stiletto heels, and who boasts about his involvement in “puppy play,” that is, grown men putting on dog masks and behaving like submitted animals for sexual stimulus—why have these two been sent to represent the US government at the celebration  Bastille Day at the French Ambassador’s residence?
Sam Brinton wrote a scathing rebuke of federal law enforcement agencies for raiding Rentboy.com, a now-defunct website that reportedly ran an illegal prostitution ring that often sold the sexual services of young boys to much older clients.[3] He stated: “The raid on its headquarters has thrown many gay, bisexual, and transgender young adults into turmoil as their main source of income has been ripped, away due to irresponsible and archaic views of sex work.”[4]
The short-term answer to these questions is the Biden administration’s radical commitment to LGBTQ ideology. The long-term answer goes back to 1977 when June Singer asked: “Can the human psyche realize its own creative potential through building its own cosmology and supplying it with its own gods?”[5] The new cosmology would include, as Singer said, “the longed-for conjunction of the opposites,” and “a new androgynous sexuality.”[6]The spirituality of the Sixties, she declared programmatically:
…[since] we have at hand…all the ingredients we will need to perform our own new alchemical opus…[the great work, a term from satanist traditions]… [we will] fuse the opposites within us: “the archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of…and witness to…the primordial cosmic unity—functioning to erase distinction…this was nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition…and a patriarchal god-image.[7]
“Primordial cosmic unity” eliminates the very notion of a distinct divine creator, thus eradicates the biblical revelation of God. Singer understood that the spiritual Age of Aquarius had to become the Age of Androgyny, that the “new humanism” predicted by Carl Jung required the full acceptance of “androgynous sexuality.
This term, androgyny, is employed in a significant way by the great expert in the history of religions, the Romanian, Mircea Eliade who argues that androgyny is a religious universal or archetype of pagan priests or shamans that appears virtually everywhere and at all times in the world’s religions. Mircea Eliade explains the spiritual meaning of androgyny as “a symbolic restoration of chaos, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.” The androgynous being thus sums up the very goal of the mystical, monistic quest, whether ancient or modern:
…androgyny in many traditional religions functions as “an archaic and universal formula for the expression of wholeness, the co-existence of the contraries, or coincidentia oppositorum . . . symboliz[ing] . . . perfection . . . [and] ultimate being. . . .[8]
Modern witches call for “a nonbinary look at Source itself,… finding our power as we reweave ourselves back into the reflection of god-herself, as the divine-androgen. [9] The androgyne is thus the physical symbol of the pagan spiritual goal, which is the merging of two seemingly distinct entities, the self and god, and a mystical return to the state of godhead prior to creation, which is the essence of idolatry.
This is the very same logic that Paul employs in Romans 1:18-27. The homosexual act exchanges the worship of God for the worship of creation. In creation, homosexuality is an inversion of God’s design for one-man, one-woman “fitted” sexual intimacy with openness to procreation. In redemption, same-sex sexuality fails to herald and signify the sacrificial redemptive relationship between Christ, the Bridegroom, and his bride, the church, as two distinct bodies united by grace.
That the pagan priesthood would be so identified, across space and time, with the blurring of sexual identity via homosexual androgyny indicates, beyond a doubt, the enormous priority paganism has given, and continues to give, to the undermining of God-ordained monogamous heterosexuality, and the divine image, and the enthusiastic promotion of androgyny in its varied forms.
Chapter 7 of the PCA Book of Church Order affirms that “teaching elders [must be] specially gifted, called and trained by God to preach…” If ever was needed this kind of worldview preaching and teaching it is surely now.
Are pastors who accept Side B thinking about homosexuality able to help students navigate through the worldview of androgynous sexuality as a fundamental opposition to biblical orthodoxy. Taking Greg Johnson as an example, he boasts, as a gay, celibate man, that not experiencing marriage in this life, is a foretaste of heaven. He sees celibacy as an “intrusion ethic,” an in-breaking of the ethics of the coming age into our present era, since in heaven “none of us will be married.”[10] This is not strictly speaking true. Though he holds up his life of celibacy as a sign of selfless Christian sacrifice, one may wonder if, in as subtle way, he uses celibacy not, as it should be, as a unique divine mission but, as, in a certain way, of maintaining his single homosexual lifestyle.[11] Perhaps a better way would be for Rev. Johnson to marry a godly Christian woman to better understand the importance of biblical heterosexual marriage. For Johnson, the mystery that moves him is that Jesus took him on “as his little brother,”[12] not his bride. For Paul, the profound mystery that God’s establishment of marriage in Genesis 2:22-25 expresses, is Christ, the bridegroom’s love for church. (Eph 5:31-2). In this sense, marriage will go on forever.
I end with a citation of my final paragraph of my review article of Greg Johnson’s book, Still Time to Care. “The call for cultural apologetics is not an appeal to pastors to preach politics! It is a matter of understanding the implications of our theology so we all can understand and live out those implications through the power of the Word and the Holy Spirit. A solid understanding of worldview is an increasingly great need in our nation’s churches and pulpits, which are abandoning orthodoxy in favor of cultural myths. They are turning away from God the Creator and Redeemer to celebrate depraved forms of pagan living. May we all speak clearly and boldly to Christians and non-Christians alike, with grace, humility, clarity, and power—following the example of the Apostle Paul.”[13] 
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] Jeffery Adams Moore, “Greater Sins: Are Certain Violations of God’s Moral Law Weightier Than Others?” A Dissertation Submitted to The Faculty Of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary In Candidacy For The Degree Of Doctor Of Philosophy (Kansas City, Missouri May 2022), p. 301
[2] Ibid., p. 20.
[3] https://www.theblaze.com/news/brinton-lgbtq-child-prostitution
[4] https://www.theblaze.com/news/brinton-lgbtq-child-prostitution
[5] June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New theory of sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1977), 237. Incredible, and never dying, this book is just as relevant today as it was initially. For Singer, there is no greater deed of mankind than to accept and integrate our opposites within. To know the androgyne is to unify the self.
[6] See the title of Singer’s book, Androgyny: Towards A New Theory Of Sexuality.
[7] Singer, Androgyny, 207.
[8] Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, 154.
[9] “Getting Straight with Spirit,” Tommie StarChild, (PantheaCon 2020 conference agenda, workshop description), p.34.
[10] Still Time to Care, 100, 158
[11] I am thankful to Rev. Also Leon for this insight.
[12] Op.cit., 241.
[13] Peter Jones,  Still Time to Care About the Whole Gospel – TruthXchange  (March 2, 2022).
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Written by Mark D. Thompson |
Sunday, May 8, 2022
Jesus himself is the way into our understanding of the Bible. After all, he is himself the center of the Bible’s message. All God’s purposes, from the beginning to the end, find their focus in him. He is the seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15) and the lamb standing as if it were slain in the middle of the new creation (Rev. 5:6). The broad biblical-theological sweep from promise to fulfillment converges on him. 

People of the Book
Why do Christians take the Bible so seriously? Despite some variety in how they might frame their doctrine of Scripture, debates about its nature and function, and differences in their understanding of particular passages and what emphasis should be placed upon them, Christians have, right from the beginning, been “people of the book.” The Swiss theologian Karl Barth famously insisted, “Christianity has always been and only been a living religion when it is not ashamed to be actually and seriously a book-religion.”1 Why is that so?
The first and most compelling reason for this is that Jesus, our Savior and Lord, had this attitude. He endorsed the Old Testament scriptures of his time. He appealed to them as the word of God as he taught his disciples, confounded those who opposed him, and explained why he had come and what he had come to do. He spoke of “the law, the prophets and the psalms” (Luke 24:44), alluding to the threefold division of the Hebrew Bible. He asked the Pharisees repeatedly, “Have you not read?” (Matt. 12, 19, 22). He insisted “it is written” (Matt. 4, 11, 21) and “the Scripture must be fulfilled” (Luke 22:37).
Yet Jesus also commissioned his apostles to take the gospel of the kingdom, the message of salvation accomplished with its attendant summons to repentance and faith, to all nations until the end of the age (Matt 24:14; 28:19–20). On the night he was betrayed, he prayed not only for them but for those who would believe in their word (John 17:20). He promised that the Spirit would remind them of all that he had taught them and give them the words to say when the time arose. They would be his authorized witnesses and their words would nourish the new communities that he would gather as the gospel was proclaimed. This gospel commission and the gift of the Spirit resulted in the New Testament, which from the beginning was read alongside the Old (Col. 4:16; 2 Pet. 3:15–16).
Jesus Is the Center
Jesus Christ himself stands uniquely at the center of the Christian doctrine of Scripture. It is not possible to follow Christ faithfully without turning your attention seriously to the Scriptures because that is precisely what he did. The suggestion of some that they follow Jesus not a book fails to pay careful attention to who Jesus is, what he said, and how he lived. Jesus positioned himself against the background of the Old Testament promises of God. He lived a perfect life of obedience to the will of God as revealed in the Old Testament. Yet we have access to his life, words, and work only through the testimony of his apostles, moved to write by the Spirit. He commissioned them to be his spokesmen, taking the gospel out from Jerusalem to Judaea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). That’s why we have the New Testament.
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