Quotes About Calvinism

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

Tim LaHaye

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

Steven J. Lawson

#3. I am not aligned in my thinking with Calvinism, neither am I aligned in my thinking with Arminianism. I have proposed a more 'Wholeistic' theology encompassing the 'both/and' in the context Objective Truth & Reality".

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#4. Religion based on divine sovereignty is religion for God's sake. Religion is for God, for whom all things exist. Whereas all forms of Arminianistic Christianity make man the final arbiter of his own salvation, in Calvinism, God saves sovereignly, immediately, whom He wills.

Henry R. Van Til

#5. Salvation is of the Lord." That is just an epitome of Calvinism; it is the sum and substance of it. If anyone should ask me what I mean by a Calvinist, I should reply, "He is one who says, Salvation is of the Lord.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

Martha Beck

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

Charles Spurgeon

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

Max Weber

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

Abraham Kuyper

#10. Calvinism and Islam had this much in common: neither was just a religion; both were social systems.

David H. Finnie

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Hilaire Belloc

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

George Whitefield

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

J.I. Packer

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

Paul Schrader

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

Charles Spurgeon

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

Abraham Kuyper

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

Aldous Huxley

#20. I have heard of wars for the defence of the Protestant religion: our enemies in this instance are equally enemies of all religion - of Lutheranism, of Calvinism; and desirous to propagate everywhere, by the force of their arms, that system of infidelity which they avow in their principles. I

Winston S. Churchill

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

Abraham Kuyper

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

Ralph Adams Cram

#23. It [Calvinism] established a religion without a prelate, a government without a king.

George Bancroft

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

David Halberstam

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

H.L. Mencken

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

R.C. Sproul

#27. It was not, as some suggest, Calvinism that made Scots hard: it was Scottish character that made Calvinism, already congenial to the national spirit, even more rock-ribbed than its Genevan counterpart.

James G. Leyburn

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

Alister E. McGrath

#29. In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

Chaim Potok

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

Austin Fischer

#31. Calvinism furnishes us with the only theology of culture that is truly relevant for the world in which we live, because it is the true theology of the Word.

Henry R. Van Til

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

Marilynne Robinson

#33. To me, Calvinism means the placing of the eternal God at the head of all things.

Charles Spurgeon

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

Austin Fischer

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

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

Paul Tillich

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

George Carey

#38. Calvinism that does not humble has missed its mark.

Walter J Chantry

#39. And, therefore, seeing he doth not intercede and pray for every one, he did not die for every one.

John Owen

#40. Eddie Fislinger's church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination.

Sinclair Lewis

#41. No man that ever lived, not John Calvin himself, ever asserted either original sin, or justification by faith, in more strong, more clear and express terms, than Arminius has done.

John Wesley

#42. Dream of yoking a gnat with an archangel, and then imagine that you can help your Lord in the work of salvation.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#43. It is the Godfather, not God the Father, who makes you an offer you can't refuse.

Peter Kreeft

#44. I am not impressed by big words,' said my uncle, who was always read enough to bandy 'predestination' and 'infralapsarianism.

Peter De Vries

#45. True and sound wisdom consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

John Calvin

#46. You can and you can't - You shall and you shan't - You will and you won't - And you will be damned if you do - And you will be damned if you don't.

Lorenzo Dow

#47. How is it more for the glory of God to save man irresistibly, than to save him as a free agent, by such grace as he may either concur or resist?

John Wesley

#48. Incarceration seems to have been obtained in consequence of Mrs. Packard using her reason and, not as reported, by her losing her reason.

Emily Mann

#49. Now comes the really amazing part. What is offered to the world, to everyone who hears the gospel, is not a love or saving achievement designed for all and therefore especially for no one; but rather, what is offered is the absolute fullness of all that Christ achieved for his elect.

John Piper

#50. There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.

John Calvin

#51. Tyranny flourishes in those societies that reject the Reformed Faith. Tyranny is squelched and liberty flourishes in those societies that embrace the Reformed Faith in all its fullness.

Joseph C. Morecraft III

#52. Although upon doctrines of grace our views differ from those avowed by Arminian Methodists, we have usually found that on the great evangelical truths we are in full agreement, and we have been comforted by the belief that Wesleyans were solid upon the central doctrines.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#53. We can no more assist the Holy Spirit in the quickening of our souls to spiritual life than Lazarus could help Jesus raise him from the dead.

R.C. Sproul

#54. I cannot conceive an intention in God that Christ should satisfy his justice for the sin of them that were in hell some thousands of years before, and yet be still resolved to continue their punishment on them to all eternity.

John Owen

#55. What is most decisive is God's Joy Project is not that we fully grasp it, but that our sovereign God fully grasps us.

Tony Reinke

#56. As Boettner so aptly observes, for the Calvinist, the atonement "is like a narrow bridge which goes all the way across the stream; for the Arminian it is like a great wide bridge that goes only half-way across." p. 41

David N. Steele

#57. No one book of scripture can be understood by itself, any more than any one part of a tree or member of the body can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part.

Charles Hodge