I was at a theological conference last month and was asked what makes ‘Evangelical’ Calvinism Evangelical? In other words, my forthcoming interlocutor wondered what distinguished Evangelical Calvinism from, well, Calvinism simpliciter. He noted: “aren’t all iterations of Calvinism evangelical?” He couldn’t imagine that the way someone, like me, was using Evangelical could mean anything else but evangelical.

Briefly, and once again (because I’m sure I’ve responded to this before here at the blog, and I know we have in the Introductions to our book, book) let me touch upon what we mean by ‘Evangelical,’ theologically. If you look at the sidebar of my blog I have had the following TF Torrance quote posted for years; I was first alerted to it by Myk Habets, and then of course read it in context later for myself in Torrance’s book The Mediation of Christ. In this brief statement we have encapsulated what it is that us Evangelical Calvinists mean by our usage of the word Evangelical; it has an adjectival force that, indeed, finds referent in a theological frame rather than its normal frame of reference which is socio-cultural (although Bebbington’s quadrilateral does have some useful theological permutation). The way we use ‘Evangelical’, more to the point, and materially, has to do with the ‘for whom’ God in Christ died; it has to do with the range and reach of the atonement. This sets us apart from our cousins, the classical or Federal Calvinists, who Limit or Particularize the atonement, redemption, to certain elect individuals whom God arbitrarily chose in absolute decree (decretum absolutum). We think this represents an anti-Evangelical Calvinism in the sense that when the Gospel is proclaimed to the masses it actually only has hypothetical value; viz. there is a disingenuous nature to the proclamation, at an ontological/metaphysical level, given the character of the Federally construed Calvinist gospel. Disingenuous, if you haven’t seen the logic yet, because the in concrete reality of the Gospel is only actually and effectually available for some and not the whole of creation; it is delimited and sublimated by a decree of God that is abstract from the person of God in the assumptio carnis, in the Incarnation. In contrast to this, TFT, Evangelical Calvinist par excellence summarizes the Gospel and its hopeful proclamation this way:

God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.[1]

For Torrance, for the Evangelical Calvinist, the Gospel reality, the work of salvation is not separated from the person of God in Christ; instead it is grounded directly in his person, and his work reposes therein, without remainder. There is no absolute decree rupturing God’s person from God’s work; the limit of salvation for the Evangelical Calvinist is God’s Triune life externalized in the concrete person, the eternal Son of God, Jesus Christ. As such the Gospel is necessarily universal, just as God’s reach is necessarily universal in his assumption of the only humanity available—the one he created and recreated—in the man from Nazareth.

So the Evangelical in Evangelical Calvinism symbolizes the genuine range of the Gospel, and it is grounded in the reality that God is the personalizing personal God whose oneness (De Deo uno) is constituted by his threeness (De Deo trino) in perichoretic wholeness and interpenetrative love. Because this God freely elected to become Creator, because this God freely elected to become human in Christ, because this God has eschatological purpose shaping his protological action forming his gracious creational act, all of humanity, just as all of creation (Rom. 8; Col. 1) is included in the first fruits of his life in Christ. Because Federal or classical Calvinists can’t affirm this, because they delimit the Gospel by separating God’s person in Christ from his works in Christ through an ad hoc decree, they cannot genuinely offer the Gospel to the whole of creation; they can only hypothetically or disingenuously do this. This is what makes Evangelical Calvinism, Evangelical; it’s what puts the Evangel into our ical.

[1] T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 94.