Ed Stetzer

During the years I’ve taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I’ve frequently been asked whether Luther was a Calvinist. The answer, of course, is no. Calvinism didn’t emerge until the end of Luther’s life. Arminianism emerged long after Luther had passed away. So Luther himself never engaged the controversy that divided Reformed Protestantism after the Reformation.

It’s true: Calvin was called a Lutheran in the early years of his ministry. And there are notable similarities between the two. But as the Reformed movement grew, it grew apart from Lutheranism in some noteworthy ways. And as Lutheran thought developed during and after the Reformation, Lutherans leaned toward Arminians more than Calvinists on a few of the doctrinal issues that divided the latter groups.

So perhaps it’s worth a minute or two to walk through the ways in which Lutherans came down on the five “points” of Calvinism. We should all understand by now that there’s far more to Calvinism than five simple points, that the five points themselves were sharpened after Calvin’s death, and that some think that Calvin himself did not affirm them all. So Calvinist friends, hold your fire. The goal here is not to oversimplify your faith, but to scan the ways that leading early Lutherans addressed the matters fought about most fiercely at the Reformed Synod of Dordt (1618–1619), and in the subsequent debates between Calvinists and Arminians.

Before we attack this matter directly, let me take just a minute to remind us that, technically speaking, the debate between Calvinists and Arminians really divided but a minority of the early Protestant world.

Despite the tendency of some to assume that all evangelicals fall somewhere on the continuum between Calvinism and Arminianism, it is important to remember that there were four main branches of the Protestant Reformation—Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, and Church of England—and that Calvinists and Arminians were on the same branch (though their controversy would captivate the Church of England as well, and was foreshadowed by developments in the doctrine of the English Reformation).

The New York Times published a piece last week called “The Data of Hate.”Much of the data came from Stormfront.org, which Times contributor Seth Stephens-Davidowitz called “America’s most popular online hate site.” It was founded in 1995 by former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black.

The frightening thing is that 76 percent of Americans on the site are under 30. According to the Times story, Stormfront’s targets break down like this: 39 percent Jews, 33 percent blacks, 13 percent Hispanics, 11 percent Muslims and 3 percent other.

This led me to surmise that many of the haters are white Christians.

I founded OnFaith eight years ago this summer. I was new to the religion world when I started and had no idea what to expect. The fact is that I was too green to anticipate the potential complications that might arise from a pluralistic religion site. I had long heard the old adage that one never discussed religion or politics at dinner, but I was not intimidated. One of my friends asked me if I was afraid of running a religion website because it might be too controversial. I replied that I had covered Washington social life for many years, and nothing was more dangerous than that.

But I hadn’t counted on one thing: the Christians. Yes, the Christians.

Anyone in the public eye — whether writing for newspapers, being in politics, or on television — gets hate mail. There are a lot of kooks out there. Back when people wrote letters, you could spot a kook from the handwriting: thin pen, slanted, and squiggly. On the outside of the envelope were often little notes like “I have electrodes in my teeth.” Inside, everything was underlined in red with lots of exclamation points. I used to wonder if there was a special school for crazy people to learn how to write these letters.

When I started OnFaith, the mail became comments on the Internet — and they were worse than the letters.

A Christian college in Massachusetts requested the freedom to live out its ideals, and since some powerful people don’t share those ideals they’re set to destroy Gordon College—unless it agrees to retreat to the closet.

In June, Gordon’s president added his name to a public letter asking President Obama to not force religious organizations into hypocrisy. Obama plans an executive order that would be the equivalent to many organizations of forcing Human Rights Campaign to hire adherents of Westboro Baptist Church. It would force anyone who receives federal funds to hire people whose sexual conduct disgraces all the world’s major religions.

Gordon, like every other observant religious institution in the world, does not want to be forced to hire people that represent the opposite of what it stands for. For that, it’s been pilloried in the press and persecutedby apparently every local public official who gets morally high from judging Gordon’s beliefs. It has already lost a contract with a local town to manage its historic town hall, and its accreditation will soon be under review—all for merely signing a letter. Gordon is only the vanguard. There is far more of this ahead, for every religious school, charity, parachurch organization, and even churches. So it’s time to pay attention to the tenderhooks of tyranny.

Gordon is at federal mercy, first, because it takes federal money. Nearly every college receives federal funds, because the federal government is the nation’s largest sponsor of subprime higher education—meaning, of course, it is by far the largest provider of student loans, made freely available without discrimination upon the basis of academic merit or likelihood of college completion.