Are you a Book IV Calvinist? & Postmillennial Definitions

Calvin spared no language to laud the Church’s role in leading us to a) right order, b) to training us to maturity from infancy to adulthood, and c) to uniting us to Christ.

What does it mean to be a Calvinist?

In the world I grew up in, the key to answering such questions was determined by Dordt’s response to Jacob Arminius. The system, later known as the Five Points of Calvinism, is attributed to Cleland Boyd McAfee (1866-1944). He coined the term in 1905. While the five points reflect much discussed in Dordt, it is still an incomplete image of what Calvinism entails.

My dispositions are more attuned to Abraham Kuyper’s distillations in his “Lectures on Calvinism,” written in the late 19th century. But still, that puts us a few centuries past the actual Calvin of history.

What did Calvin say that made him so precisely Calvinistic?