Yesterday, Team Pyro offered a post entitled, “Filthy Calvinists, and the People Who Love to Hate Them.” Basically, the post contends that people love to hate Calvinists and Calvinism and offers non-Calvinists opportunity to explain why. 254 comments later, the conversation still rages.
I read the post yesterday and shrugged. I glanced at about 5 comments thinking, Why do we work ourselves up over this stuff? Nothing new here. Get back to the sermon.
Then last night I curled up with a couple titles given to me for my birthday while in South Africa at Easter. One is by a South African former educator, corporate type, writer and satirist, Ndumiso Ngcobo (who kinda looks like Randy Jackson from American Idol), entitled, Is It Coz I’m Black?
And what should be the title of the night’s essay?
“No Sex, Please! We’re Calvinists.”
Huh?
Like the other essays in the book, this one is a half-serious, half-humorous look at life in South Africa from an admittedly warped perspective. In this case, the essay offers a rather honest look at condom use–or lack thereof–and calls for some much needed honesty in South African hook-up culture (though that’s needed in every place in addition to South Africa).
Anyway, the jab at Calvinists was curious indeed. And, as is far too often the case, historically and theologically just plain wrong. But in honor of the claim over at Pyromaniacs, I offer Ngcobo’s paragraph (the only one touch Calvinism in the article) as exhibit 255 in the “why they love to hate Calvinism and Calvinists” discussion:
Sex is a beautiful, beautiful thing–despite what John Calvin thought.
For the uninitiated in the constipated thoughts of John Calvin, he was the anally retentive bearded fellow who right royally screwed up many societies across the world with his 16th-century theological opinions. He convinced many followers that Jesus wants us all to be miserable and to resist the temptation to partake in any activities that might bring us pleasure. Such as sex. If I were president of the world for a day I’d have his body exhumed, subjected to a firing squad and hanged upside down by his nads on Mary Fitzgerald Square. Him and a succession of those purple-robed pious men with tiny hats from the Vatican (p. 109).
There you have it. Calvin and Calvinists love misery and hate pleasure, including sex–unless, of course, it’s miserable sex. Wow. And this guy managed to put Calvin at the head of a firing line with a succession of Catholic priests! That’s no small feat. To be sure, this is the only way to get Calvin and men from the Vatican in a line-up together.
Anyway, to correct such a warped view of that theology which did indeed change the world, you might try the following talks:
Mark Dever, “Christian Hedonists or Religious Prudes? The Puritans on Sex” (2004 Desiring God National Conference)
John Piper, “Sex and the Supremacy of Christ” (Part one and part two)
Ben Patterson, “The Goodness of Sex and the Glory of God“