Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 47:187 (Jul 1890)
Article: Seven Failures Of Ultra-Calvinism
Author: John Miller

BSac 47:187 (July 1890) p. 491

Seven Failures Of Ultra-Calvinism

John Miller

THE Northern Presbyterian Church, just now in the throes of a dangerous revolution, is the largest branch of the largest Protestant body on our planet. It is not so large as the Methodist, if we count only in America. It is not so large as the Episcopal, if we count only in England and America. But if we count over all lands, and include all churches presbyterially governed, our reckoning will hold. So enormous an interest, just now so deranged, is worth watching, not simply if we be Presbyterians, nor solely if we be Christians, but if we be men of any school; for there are strange problems in it, and things hard to be understood, of people probably above the average of intelligence in Christendom.

These presbyterially governed men have sinned in two particulars: first, like cannel coal, they are awful for splitting up,—”Burghers” and “Anti-Burghers,” “Associate” and “Reformed,” “Free,” “United,” and “Established” making one nation, at least, provoke a smile, when their church course is talked of; and, second, they shock conscience by certain outrages on faith, which the best hearts dare not and ought not to endure; and which have wrecked truth and roused doubt in all seats under Presbyterian control. It is time that the world should understand this.

What we affirm is, that there have been seven strongholds of Presbyterian theology; I mean by that, seven successive fortresses of this hyper-calvinistic faith; and that

BSac 47:187 (July 1890) p. 492

every one of them has bred defection; and that in a sense, not merely of driving men into a recoil antagonistic to the pious founders of the school, but revolutionary in the end to the pious revolutionists themselves; so that Dr. Martineau last year, a very determined Unitarian, cries out in a sort of mental agony, that he is unwilling to have spent his life in giving help to a body that can be dreamed of as a mere philosophy, and that if he is a Unitarian, he wishes to suppose his labor to have been for, a scriptural and religious Unitarianism. Our position therefore is, that the world has tried ultra-calvinistic thought to the extent of seven successive centres of it; that that trial has ranged over four centuries; and with the punctuality of light has produced infidelity in every land where it has reigned. Is it not time that such centres should begin to suspect their system?

If men say, This thing is built of wickedness; it is but the usual wave by which one age is set up in pious teaching and which recedes the next, then I wish to rejoin—and this is a large motive for writing—that waves are little incident to other teaching. Methodism has growth, and without such rec...