WHY WE REJECT CALVINISM: A WESTERN ORTHODOX RESPONSE TO A MODERN HERESY

Christ Teaches a Tormented John Calvin that “I Am the One Who is God”, and Calvin Does Not have the Authority to Contradict His Holy Teachings

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

INTRODUCTION 

Among the many theological systems that arose in the tumultuous aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, few are as rigorously rationalistic, or as spiritually dead, as that of John Calvin. His Institutes of the Christian Religion, written in the 16th century, attempted to reshape the entire structure of Christian soteriology through the lens of predestinarian logic. But for the Western Orthodox, rooted in the undivided Faith of the first millennium, the Seven Ecumenical Councils, and the worshipping mind of our holy Fathers and Mothers, Calvinism represents a tragic departure from both the Apostolic tradition and the biblical witness.

The danger of Calvinism is not merely that it is harsh or rigid, but that it is unbiblical, anti-Patristic, and ultimately misrepresents the key terms by which Holy Scripture communicates the mystery of salvation. Words like election, predestination, justification, and salvation are twisted in Calvin’s system into alien shapes - philosophical constructs that bear little resemblance to the faith once delivered to the saints.

CALVINISM AS A PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM, NOT A PATRISTIC ONE

Calvinism is built on a closed logical framework, not on the lived worship and mystical theology of the ancient Church. The Fathers were not systematizers in the modern sense; they were stewards of mystery, proclaiming truths that surpass reason without violating it. Calvin, on the other hand, collapses mystery into rational determinism that can explain everything about God, the Creator, the Sustainer, and the Unknowable and Mysterious “One,” in terms that a logical 15-year old boy can obsess about, feeling that God can be ultimately known and understood in simple categories. His concept of “double predestination” - that God elects some to eternal life and others to damnation, not based on foreseen merit but by inscrutable decree - is utterly foreign to the Fathers. It also means that God, who says that He is light, love and life, is also the origin of sin, hatred and eternal death! 

St. John of Damascus, writing centuries before Calvin, affirms that “God foreknows, but does not predestine evil.” Likewise, St. Irenaeus writes of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom in harmony, never in conflict. St. Gregory of Nyssa compares God’s election to a master musician drawing forth harmony from the varied strings of the human soul. These Fathers do not teach a God who arbitrarily damns for His own glory, but One who lovingly calls all, even while respecting human freedom.

INDIVIDUALISM AGAINST THE BIBLICAL COVENANTAL FRAMEWORK

Perhaps the most foundational error of Calvinism is its collapse of corporate, covenantal terms into individual destiny. Scripture speaks overwhelmingly of election, predestination, and salvation in corporate terms. But Calvinism distorts these into private decrees about eternal fate.

Romans 9:11 is the classic Calvinist proof-text for unconditional election. Yet Paul’s argument is explicitly about God’s choice of peoples - Israel and the Gentiles - for covenantal vocation, not individual salvation. “Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated” (Romans 9:13) refers not to two babies in the womb, but to two nations (Malachi 1:2–3). The entire section concludes with God’s mercy upon all(Romans 11:32).

The Old Testament consistently frames election as vocational, not fatalistic. “The Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself” (Deuteronomy 7:6), and again, “I have chosen thee, and not cast thee away” (Isaiah 41:9). This is covenantal language - communal, dynamic, and conditioned upon response is perverted if wrongly applied to the individual human being. The New Testament continues this: “Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9). Here, the Church is elected as a body, not a collection of individually pre-approved souls.

The Fathers affirm this pattern. St. Chrysostom remarks that “Paul does not say they were justified without faith, but that they were called. And even this calling was not without their cooperation.” St. Cyprian of Carthage is even more direct: “He cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother.” Election and salvation occur within the body, not outside it.

Calvinism takes what Scripture applies to the corporate body and isolates it to the individual soul - turning corporate mercy into private fate. This is profoundly tragic! 

THE ABUSE OF BIBLICAL TERMS

Calvinism’s fatal flaw lies in its hijacking of sacred terms and their repurposing to serve a deterministic narrative.

Election, as noted above, is vocational and communal, not individual and final. The chosen are those whom God invites into His covenant and equips for service - not a pre-selected class guaranteed eternal life apart from their will.

“Predestination,” in Romans 8:29, refers to God’s loving intention to conform believers to the image of His Son. It is always Christ-centered and corporate, never fatalistic. St. Maximos the Confessor writes, “Those who are foreknown are those who cooperate with grace,” showing that divine foreknowledge presumes synergy, not compulsion.

“Justification”, in Calvin’s system, is a legal fiction - God declares a sinner righteous, though the sinner remains inwardly unchanged, unmoved and full of their sins. But the biblical term dikaiosis means to “make righteous.”Justification is not an abstract declaration, but a real participation in Christ’s righteousness through baptism, faith, repentance, and the sacraments. St. Athanasius teaches that through union with Christ, we become what He is by grace. Justification is the first stage of theosis, not a distant court ruling that frees without relationship, new life, cooperation, purification, holiness and obeying our Lord and Savior. 

“Salvation” is likewise misunderstood. Calvinists treat it as a one-time forensic event. But in Scripture, salvation is a process: past (“by grace ye are saved” Ephesians 2:8), present (“to us who are being saved” 1 Corinthians 1:18), and future (“we shall be saved by his life” Romans 5:10). It involves struggle, cooperation, submission to the accountability of others, sacramental activity, and perseverance. As St. Cyril of Jerusalem says: “This grace, therefore, comes upon the soul and is not separated from it again, unless the soul itself drives it away.”

THE LOSS OF SACRAMENTAL MEDIATION

Calvinism also strips salvation of its sacramental form. Where the Scriptures and the Fathers teach that justification and sanctification are mediated through baptism and the Eucharist, Calvinism reverts to a purely spiritual, non-ecclesial model.

In Romans 6, St. Paul writes that we are “baptized into Christ’s death.” In John 6, Christ insists that unless we eat His Flesh and drink His Blood, we have no life in us. These are not empty metaphors but mysteries of cooperation, infilling, and transformative grace - a visible means by which God communicates invisible grace. St. Ambrose writes, “The water of baptism does not cleanse by its own nature, but by the operation of the Holy Spirit.”

Calvin’s system, by contrast, sees the sacraments as mere signs or tokens for the elect. The receptionist view that this propagates insist that Christ is in the Christian believer (those God predestined and can only truly be known by Him), and this leads to the error of saying that those “true Christians” are taking empty sacraments, reflecting themselves, and that also, unbelievably, they hold the fullness of Christ without needing to obey Him or be like Him in any way! The result is a disembodied salvation: no visible Church, no priesthood, no altar - just the individual soul and its decree. This perversion of theology results in blasphemy!

THE ETHICAL AND SPIRITUAL COST OF CALVINISM

The pastoral cost of Calvinism is severe. If one is elect and cannot fall, repentance becomes superfluous and unnecessary. If one is reprobate and cannot rise, repentance becomes useless, and a wholesale embrace of sin is the only logical response. Assurance is grounded not in the fruits of the Spirit or communion with Christ, but in the inward guess that one might be among the elect, based on the assumptions of pride and sufficiency. 

This is not the security of the Gospel, which is based on God’s immutable love and boundless compassion. Instead, it is spiritual fatalism. Either one presumes upon God’s mercy, or despairs of ever attaining it. There is no pathway of holiness to walk and one is left adrift in the world with nothing left to do but pursue secular occupations and worldly pursuits!! 

The Scriptures call us to another path: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13). This is synergy, not decree. This is the obedience of a disciple, doing what his Master tells him to do, not the forceful self-appointed confidence of those who believe themselves to be innately and irrevocably better. 

Hebrews 6 and 10 speak of real apostasy. St. John Chrysostom warns against “the fatal pit of presumption,” calling believers to vigilance. The Christian life is not an election certificate - a legal mechanism for the impartation of a salvific title. it is a race to be run, a warfare to be fought, a Bridegroom to be awaited with lamp lit and loins girded. It is a life in which we take Jesus at His word and do what he has commended us to do. 

THE DOCTRINE OF GOD IS DISTORTED

Lastly - and most gravely - Calvinism distorts the very nature and character of God. In its zeal for sovereignty, it makes Him the Author of evil. In its fixation on decree, it empties divine love of content, so confident in asserting that it knows how God does things that it forgets to ask the question “why.” The result is a god who predestines most of mankind to eternal torment - not for their sins, but to glorify his justice, a justice that turns out to be capricious spite and delight in torture. 

This is not the God revealed in Jesus Christ. The Incarnate Word weeps over Jerusalem, stretches forth His hands all the day to a disobedient people, and lays down His life for the world - not for a select remnant. “God is love,” says St. John, not will. His sovereignty is not the tyranny of predetermination but the freedom of self-giving. Scripture tells us in 2 Peter 3:9 - “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” And in 1 Timothy: “For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.”.” 

St. Gregory the Theologian warns us not to define God by abstract power, but by His revealed nature in Christ crucified: the God who suffers with, and for, His creation. He “thought it not robbery” to put aside His glory, His absolute power, and take on the form of a servant, and be put to death by mere mortals, His creation. A theology that contradicts the meaning of the Cross contradicts the Gospel, and is therefore anathema to us as Christians. 

THE WESTERN ORTHODOX VISION

We do not reject divine initiative, grace, or God’s sovereignty. The Holy Spirit imparts life to all, and with that gift of love, grace to all men. No man chooses God but by the grace that the Lord imparts through His breath of life! We proclaim, with the Church of the first millennium, that God’s sovereignty is the freedom of love, not the tyranny of will. Grace does not destroy nature but heals it. The elect are those who cooperate with God’s grace, not passive recipients of a hidden decree. Justification is transformative. Predestination is in Christ. Salvation is the fruit of union with God through the sacraments, the Scriptures, the communion of the saints, and the indwelling Spirit. All of these are God’s sovereign choice for our redemption. We do not partake in the sacraments because of magical thinking, or the error of thinking we can control or ultimately understand God, but because He COMMANDS that we do so! Our obedience to the pathways of holiness and transformation that He established recognizes Him to be sovereign, all powerful, all knowing, all good and all life-giving - and, thus, our sacramental system declares God’s sovereignty over all! 

We reject Calvinism not because we prefer tradition to truth, but because Calvinism is not the truth of the tradition that was once and for all delivered to the saints. It is a modern error masquerading as ancient wisdom, born not of the Upper Room, the Apostolic Fathers in the mouths of lions, or burning as torches, or the desert Fathers battling with demons, but of Geneva’s lecture halls and the sterile mind of a tormented soul. 

Let the final word be that of St. Basil the Great: “It is impious to say that sin is natural; and it is blasphemy against God to make Him the author of evil.”

Let us return to the God of mercy, freedom, and truth - the God revealed in Jesus Christ, our Lord, who has commanded all men everywhere to repent and be saved (Acts 17:30), not in some grim decree in the darkened hearts of men.

COLLECT

ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father, who hast revealed thyself not as the Author of confusion, nor of condemnation, but as the God of love, calling all men unto salvation through thy Son Jesus Christ: Deliver us, we beseech thee, from all false doctrine, especially from the hardness of heart and blasphemies of proud men who deny thy mercy and pervert thy holy Word; Grant that we, being illumined by thy Scriptures, and nourished by the teaching of thy blessed Apostles and Fathers, may so embrace thy grace as to walk in holiness and truth all the days of our life; that, persevering in faith and love, we may be made partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

#AncientChurchoftheWest #OrthodoxArchdiocese #AngloCeltic #AngloOrthodox #HistoricChristianity #OrthodoxTheology #BiblicalOrthodoxy #OneHolyCatholicApostolic #AgainstCalvinism #PatristicFaith #OrthodoxDoctrine #WesternOrthodoxy #ChurchFathers #AncientFaith #FaithOfTheFathers #SacramentalLife #OrthodoxApologetics #TheologyMatters #RecoveringOrthodoxy